Simona Olmi

The research activity of Dr Simona Olmi ranges from Statistical Physics and Nonlinear Dynamics to (computational) Neuroscience and Complex Networks; her activity has definitely an interdisciplinary approach, since she applies techniques and methods borrowed from statistical physics and nonlinear dynamics to characterize biological systems, mainly to neuroscience, but also with application to biomolecules. In particular, her analysis of neural circuits is at the cutting edge among extremely recent developments in theoretical analysis and in the modeling of brain circuits, and relevant medical and biological applications, such as the analysis of seizure propagation in epileptic patients performed at the university of Aix-Marseille. Dr Olmi obtained her MSc (cum laudae) in Theoretical Physics at the University of Florence in 2009 with a dissertation on the emergence of collective oscillations in massively connected neural networks. In 2013 she obtained her PhD in Nonlinear Dynamics and Complex Systems at the University of Florence with a thesis on pulse coupled neural networks, focused on the role played by the topology in the emergence of collective states displaying erratic behaviours at the macroscopic and microscopic level. Afterwards, during her first postdoc fellowship at Istituto dei Sistemi Complessi (ISC-CNR) in Sesto Fiorentino (2012-2014), she started working on multiscale networks of rotators with applications ranging from power grids to anesthetic-induced unresponsiveness in insects and mammals. During 2015, once obtained a fixed term position as researcher at ISC-CNR, she continued her activity on the emergence of mesoscopic/macroscopic states in complex networks. In 2016 she got a half-year postdoc position at the Institut de Neurosciences des Systemes (INS) in Marseille; the period spent at INS allowed her to establish new collaborations with medical doctors at La Timone Hospital (Prof. Fabrice Bartolomei) and within La Timone Faculty of Medicine (Prof. Maxime Guye) and to have direct access to experimental data of epileptic patients, such as PET, EEG and stereotactic EEG data, which are used to locate the zone to resect in surgery. In 2016-2017 she worked at the Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics (Berlin, Germany) with a research project on Dynamical Multiscale Engineering of Network Architecture. In 2017-2018 she worked at the Institut für Theoretische Physik (Technische Universität Berlin - Berlin, Germany) on a research project related to Controlling Multiscale Networks via interplay of dynamics and topology. In 2018 she got a Starting Research Position at Inria Sophia Antipolis Méditerranée Research Centre (France) to work on development of neural mass models. From 2019 she is permanent staff of the ISC-CNR-Institute, where she is researcher. The complete list of publications is consultable in Simona Olmi’s Google Scholar profile at https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-lSf8mYAAAAJ&hl=en