Hi, welcome to my website!
I recently joined the Fusani Lab at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna (KLIVV), Austria as a postdoctoral researcher and at the University of Vienna (Department of Behavioral & Cognitive Biology) as a Senior Research Fellow, where I will be researching courtship behaviour of several bird species using data science and machine learning tools.
Before that, I was a postdoc at the Department of Biological Sciences of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), in Baltimore, MD (USA) with Tamra Mendelson and at the Centre for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology (CEFE, CNRS) in Montpellier, France, with Julien Renoult. There, I worked on sexual signal design in the darter fish (Etheostoma) and aimed to understand better the evolution of pattern preferences and sexual signal design (processing bias theory and efficient coding framework). The main idea was to use artificial neural networks to create novel stimuli that mimic natural statistics but also to use them as a model of the visual system. Besides that project, I also explored the link between visual attractiveness and camouflage patterns in humans.
Before my postdocs, I completed my PhD studies in cognitive neuroscience at the Brain and Cognition Research Center (CerCo), in Toulouse, France.
My PhD project aimed to investigate how the primate visual system processes binocular disparities (underlying depth perception) in space and time. I also explored the relationship between the 3D properties of the environment and neural responses. I mostly conducted functional neuroimaging (fMRI) studies in macaques. But I also collected psychophysics measurements in humans and macaques to give insight into the link between visual perception, natural statistics, and brain activity.

In a more general way, I am interested in understanding and studying how different species' sensory systems and cognitive functions are shaped by or adapted to the environment in which they evolve (sensory and cognitive ecology) and how this plays a role in the evolution of sexual signals.