PhD in Cognitive and Brain Sciences
Functional Neuroimaging lab at IIT @gozziale.bsky.social.
Currently mapping large-scale brain networks with Functional Ultrasound Imaging 🐭🧠
Chiara Pepe
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24/04/2026, PhD in Cognitive and Brain Sciences, cum laude 🎓 @cimecunitrento.bsky.social @iitalk.bsky.social
What a wonderful journey life is. I am so grateful that I’m still out of words..I’ll let these pictures speak.
And yes, my lab really did build me a cardboard Iconeus machine!!
Chiara Pepe
🧠What if increasing neuronal firing could actually reduce fMRI connectivity?
📡What drives long-range fMRI connectivity?
I’m very excited to share that my PhD work is now out as a preprint
Check this out! 👇
doi.org/10.64898/202...
1️⃣We find that cortical excitability inversely relates to fMRI connectivity.
2️⃣These changes are predicted by low-frequency (<4 Hz) LFP coherence.
3️⃣Biophysical modeling shows that these effects arise from the interaction between local firing changes and shared slow brain-wide LFP power fluctuations.
Best part: the state transitions aren’t random! They form a structured grammar that converges onto three stable attractor-like co-activation modes, matching hallmark fMRI dynamics.
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Take-home message: you can map the mouse functional connectome easily and conveniently with transcranial fUSI. As a long-time fMRI user, I’m genuinely struck by how much lower the technical and infrastructural barrier is compared with MRI!
12/n
But static maps are only half the story. Resting brain activity moves through states. fUSI captures this too: activity falls into recurring co-activation patterns, organized into paired opposites (CAP/anti-CAPs).
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If you’d like to play with these data or run your own analyses, all datasets (fUSI + fMRI) and the full analysis code are openly available here
zenodo.org/records/1848... 🚀
13/n
Alessandro Gozzi
Alessandro Gozzi
Alessandro Gozzi
Alessandro Gozzi
📢 New preprint from the lab🧠
▶️doi.org/10.64898/2026.03.12.710517
What does fMRI connectivity actually reflect at the neural level?
The natural intuition is: more neural activity = more connectivity! Using cortical perturbations we show this is not necessarily the case: sometimes less is more!
👇🧵
But we didn’t stop at one correlation number. We found that structure–function coupling is best understood as four major axes, i.e., 4 dominant “wiring-to-function motifs” shaping the whole connectome
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Finally, huge credit to soon-to-be-PhD @chiarapepe.bsky.social who led this work with exceptional rigor and vision, and to @jcmariani.bsky.social who co-led and shaped the project throughout. And grateful to @erc.europa.eu and @iitalk.bsky.social for supporting this research! 14/14
