Jessica Lucchesi

PostDOC

Jessica Lucchesi received her Bachelor’s degree in Biological Science in 2017 and her Master’s degree in Biomedical Biology in 2019 at University of Florence, with Dr. Anna Letizia Allegra Mascaro as supervisor.

Her thesis work was part of a research line that aimed at studying kinematics parameters and at characterizing the activation patterns of neuronal populations distributed on the mouse cerebral cortex during reaching and grasping tasks.

Currently, she is a PhD student, with Dr. Anna Letizia Allegra Mascaro as mentor, in the Doctoral School in Atomic and Molecular Photonics at the European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy (LENS) of University of Florence, in the Neurophotonics Group of Prof. Francesco Saverio Pavone.

Her main research goal is to develop an innovative head-mounted, wide-field microscope to monitor neural activity on both hemispheres in freely moving mice engaged in social interaction.

This miniaturized optical system will be mounted on the head of a transgenic mouse model that expresses genetically encoded calcium indicators in a subset of excitatory cortical neurons to monitor cortical activity in awake, freely moving mice.