Lab members

Maximiliano Jose Nigro

Group leader

I have always been interested in animal behavior. Since I was a kid, I was observing birds and their habits in my parent’s backyard. As a teenager I discovered the work of Charles Darwin and Konrad Lorenz and I started reading all their books. But it wasn’t until reading “Bright Air, Brilliant Fire” by Gerald Edelman that I fell in love with neuroscience. Since then I have worked in different fields from ion channel biophysics, cellular neurophysiology and neuronal diversity. During my training I had the privilege of working with amazing scientists: Jacopo Magistretti (PhD), Johan Storm (postdoc in cellular neurophysiology), Bernardo Rudy (postdoc in inhibitory circuits and diversity) and Menno Witter (systems neuroscience). In 2020 I received a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellowship and in January 2021 I joined the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience to establish my own research group. At Kavli, I aim to study how the diversity of neurons in the cortex contributes to computations such as sensory and multisensory processing and ultimately to behavior.

Email me: maximiliano.j.nigro@ntnu.no

Google Scholar

My NCBI

Luis Fernando Cobar Zelaya

Kavli Postdoctoral fellow, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow (MSCA-2021)

I come from El Salvador, a small country in Central America. I was honoured to receive a scholarship from Taiwan, where I studied biochemistry at NTU in Taiwan, and later I pursued a PhD under the supervision of Prof. Ayumu Tashiro at NTU in Singapore. In my studies I used electrophysiology coupled with optogenetics to explore neuronal circuits in the dentate gyrus of freely behaving mice. I also had the privilege of working with head mounted microscopes for calcium imaging as well as working to develop methods for bimodal recording on head-restrained mice. I like running, reddit and reading about languages.

Email me: luis.f.c.zelaya@ntnu.no

Francois Philippe Pauzin

Researcher

I graduated from my PhD studies in neurosciences at the Ruhr university of Bochum, Germany under the supervision of Prof. Patrik Krieger. I worked on electrophysiology combined with optogenetic in the in-vivo mouse model. I then moved to California to the lab of Prof. Moxon at UC Davis, where I worked on positional control leading me to acquire experience on rodent’s freely moving electrophysiology technics. I continued my scientific career at the university of Bergen, Norway (Prof. Bramham’s lab) where I gained salient experience in the molecular study of synaptic plasticity, including regulation of gene expression and novel analysis of Arc protein domain function.

A major goal in neuroscience is to decipher how our senses (smell, taste, sight, sound, and touch) are transformed from their physical and/or chemical properties (i.e., light wavelengths for sight) into electrical information that will reach the brain. In the Nigro lab, I will be focusing on how this multiplex information is encoded by the brain as a whole.

Email me: francois.p.pauzin@ntnu.no

Anna Lovise Einarsson

Master student, NTNU

I hold a BSc in Psychology from Queen Mary, University of London, where I investigated uncertainty
monitoring in bumblebees, contributing to the broader debate on invertebrate sentience. Intrigued by
how the brain transforms multiple streams of ambiguous sensory data into coherent representations of
the world, I developed an interest in studying these mechanisms at a deeper, more granular level. This
led me to the Nigro Lab, with its focus on multisensory integration. For my thesis, I will investigate
the cell types that receive feedback projections from the perirhinal cortex in the mouse sensory cortex.

Email me: annalsk@stud.ntnu.no