Shared neural activity across worms
Aligning the neural activity of different worms through their posture. Posture weights learned on other worms carry over to a held-out worm, with no behavior labels and no neuron identities.
Pietro Verzelli
Senior Research Fellow in Computational Neuroscience
Zimmer Lab, University of Vienna
Tchumatchenko Lab, University Hospital Bonn
As a computational neuroscientist, I study how neural activity gives rise to behavior.
I am a Senior Research Fellow in Prof. Manuel Zimmer's lab at the University of Vienna, supported by the Argelander Mobility Grant, working on computational and theoretical neuroscience. My research focuses on the relationship between neural activity and behaviors. I am also affiliated with Tatjana Tchumatchenko's Lab at the University Hospital Bonn, where I have been a postdoc since 2022.
I received my B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Bologna in 2015 and my M.Sc. in Physics of Complex Systems from the University of Turin in 2017. In my master's thesis, I developed statistical tools to study neural activity, supervised by Prof. Laura Sacerdote. I obtained my PhD at IDSIA under the supervision of Prof. Cesare Alippi and Prof. Lorenzo Livi, with a thesis on machine learning for dynamical systems.
I mainly deal with the pointless aspects of important things.
News
Jun 2026
New Job!
I have started a new position as Senior Research Fellow at the University of Vienna, working with Prof. Manuel Zimmer, supported by the Argelander Mobility Grant
Jun 2026
Bio-Inspired Deep Learning Workshop
The fourth edition was a great success. It was a pleasure to help Max in the organization.
May 2026
Satellite Workshop at Bernstein Conference
The workshop that I submitted with Jens Tillmann, titled "Towards a Quantitative Approach to Behavior" has been selected for Bernstein Conference 2026!
May 2026
Updated Website
Updated the website with new content and design improvements.
Current work
Seizure prediction from behavior
Non-invasive early detection of seizures from behavior. Video is turned into pose estimates, paired with EEG annotations, and a neural network forecasts upcoming seizures.
Behavioral manifolds
Many neural manifolds may simply reflect behavior. Comparing neural and behavioral manifolds across worms, monkeys and rats.
Reservoir computing and dynamical systems
Recurrent networks that learn dynamical systems. A reservoir is driven by a chaotic source, then run autonomously on its own output. Does it stay on the attractor or leave it?
Stable learning and plasticity
Biologically plausible models of learning and plasticity, and how learning stays stable and adaptive in the presence of stochasticity, variability and environmental change.
Latest posts
Jun 17, 2026
Everything is a computer (if you are brave enough) - Part 1
There is a question that computational neuroscientists are not supposed to ask too casually, because it sounds either obvious or meaningless: Is the brain a computer?
Read More →Oct 14, 2025
Coronavirus: The Mathematics of Contagion
This post is the English translation of an online article I published during the COVID-19 pandemic on Immoderati.it. At the time, I wanted to explain—using simple mathematical tools—how epidemiological models...
Read More →Feb 09, 2025
Hopfield Networks - Part 1
With John Hopfield recently receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics, it’s the perfect time to dive into his groundbreaking work on neural networks. In this series, I’ll explore the fascinating...
Read More →Dec 19, 2023
Delays are all you need
When dealing with dynamical systems, one usually faces the problem of partially-observed data. The engineering literature deals a lot with partially-observed linear dynamical systems, but do we have any hope...
Read More →