Giulio-Pergola-PhD

About

Dr. Giulio Pergola, Ph.D., is interested in the mechanisms that make humans different from one another: genetics, environmental factors, and their combined impact on the brain. His work moves from considering that nature and nurture determine our experience and related brain changes. As inter-individual differences depend on genes and experience, he investigates developmental trajectories and how people can change them with training or novel drug development. His vision is to translate research into actionable knowledge to afford opportunities – particularly to adolescents and individuals at risk of mental illness – to change the course of their life. He trained as a Biologist in Bari (Italy) with a thesis on Anthropology and human evolution. He attended the International Graduate School of Neuroscience (IGSN) in Bochum (Germany) for my PhD. The IGSN is an interdisciplinary doctoral school with faculty from all areas of Neuroscience – biological, computational, clinical, and psychological. His Ph.D. was part of Novobrain (Marie Curie Early Stage Training FP6), a program dedicated to learning and memory. He worked with Prof. Daum, Prof. Suchan, and Prof. Güntürkün to acquire a background in human neuroimaging, morphometry, and neuropsychology. He then moved to the Italian excellence campus “SISSA” (Trieste, Italy), where he trained in cognitive neuroscience with Prof. Rumiati. In 2013 he undertook an assistant professorship in Psychiatry at the University of Bari Aldo Moro (UNIBA) in Bari (Italy) to work with Prof. Bertolino on the mechanisms underlying schizophrenia. He resumed his biological vocation and integrated his knowledge of neuroimaging and cognition with genomics and transcriptomics. Dr. Pergola is an Investigator at the Lieber Institute for Brain Development (LIBD), where his research agenda is to develop statistical approaches to identify potential novel drug targets based on functional genomics and validate these insights via clinical, neuroimaging, and behavioral predictions. The driving idea is that risk genes for psychiatric disorders converge onto gene co-expression networks and explain brain pattern variation across individuals. He is establishing his team, which currently includes Research Associate Madhur Parihar and two graduate students visiting from Italy (Gianluca C. Kikidis and Fabiana Rossi). Since August 2021, Dr. Pergola has been an associate professor in Neuropsychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at UNIBA’s School of Medicine, where he coordinates the Group of Psychiatric Neuroscience (>50 members), and he heads the laboratory of Brain Imaging, Networks, and Data mining (BIND)(11 members). BIND exists to bind the biological layers that are the foundation of our brain and behavior. WE'RE HIRING!  Check out our available positions ... Postdoctoral Fellow--Complex Systems Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow--Neuroscience