From Rest to Action: Functional Connectivity Architecture of the Human Hand Motor Network

Skillful hand motor control relies on complex interactions within a distributed brain network. Over the past two decades, neuroimaging (fMRI) and neurostimulation (TMS) techniques have greatly advanced our understanding of the functional contributions of individual regions. Yet, a central open question in motor neuroscience concerns the dynamic interactions among these regions: while their local roles are well characterized, their network-level organization and functional integration remain l...

Making Sense of Our Surroundings: A Study of Environmental Temperature Across Perception, Multisensoriality, and Social Behaviour

Our perception of temperature is not only a matter of physics: it shapes how we feel, think, and even behave around others. While previous research has mostly focused on how single body parts detect localised temperature changes, improving our understanding of the physiological and neurological basis of thermal sensing, no study with a similar methodological approach had investigated our ability to perceive ambient temperature at the whole-body level. This PhD thesis aimed to explore precisel...

Influence of Optogenetic Modulation and Convulsant Drugs on Neuronal Activity

ADOPTING THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY: SUPPLY CHAIN AND ORGANIZATIONAL PERSPECTIVES

The circular economy (CE) is an alternative economic paradigm that is regenerative by design and aims at decoupling economic growth from material input by reducing, reusing, recycling and recovering materials and energy to minimise resource depletion, waste and emissions. The adoption of CE practices requires companies to access external resources and capabilities, creating disruptive changes due to the creation of the reverse flow of value, materials and information. Despite the proliferatio...

New perspectives on the multimodal validation of the human brain white matter anatomy.

For much of history, the brain has fascinated scholars as the seat of thought, sensation, and behavior. Early theories of brain functioning focused on the cortical surface, seeking to localize cognition within discrete gray matter regions. Today, it is clear that the richness of human behavior cannot be explained based on the activity of isolated cortical modules alone, but rather emerges from the communication between them, supported by networks of white matter connections. Diffusion MRI-bas...

Denitrification Under Salinity Stress in Biofilm Reactors

Denitrification represents a sustainable solution to remove nitrate from saline wastewaters generated by many industrial activities such as food processing, aquaculture, flue gas washing, etc. To improve the process’ performance under salinity inhibition, biofilm reactors could represent an elegant strategy, but a systematic analysis focusing on the reactor system under salinity stress is needed for their optimisation. Moreover, since the electron donors available for the process may vary, th...

Sound Propagation in Superfluids with Two Broken Continuous Symmetries

At ultralow temperatures, matter exhibits striking quantum phenomena, among which superfluidity plays a central role in this thesis. Initially observed in liquid helium, it features frictionless flow and persistent currents. It is closely related to Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC), where bosons coherently occupy a single quantum state. The advent of atomic BECs enabled highly tunable quantum systems, in which interatomic interactions can be controlled via Feshbach resonances. Systems with di...

Mechanistic modeling of alpha-synuclein aggregation and brain pharmacokinetics for drug development in neurodegeneration

Mechanistic modeling plays an increasingly important role in central nervous system (CNS) drug development, but its impact depends on how well models reflect the underlying biology and account for the limitations of available data. This thesis addresses these challenges through two distinct yet complementary research areas, focused on foundational and methodological aspects of quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) and physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling. The first part of ...

Why ULM has not yet been integrated in clinical practice?

Ultrasound Localization Microscopy (ULM) has emerged as a promising ultrasound-based technique to characterize microvascular structures, due to its ability to overcome the ultrasound diffraction limit. The enhanced resolution capability is a consequence of precise localizations of microbubbles (MBs) injected in the circulatory system. These localizations can be used to track MBs over time to obtain not only geometrical, but also dynamic information of microvascular flow. ULM combines its abil...