Gabriella Bottini - Biography#

Gabriella Bottini is a full professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pavia and a Delegate with responsibility for the University's Third Mission activities. She is the director of the Cognitive Neuropsychology Center of Niguarda Hospital in Milan. Her research is mainly focused on neuropsychological disorders associated with brain lesions and neurodegenerative diseases. She also develops studies on normal subjects to construct cognitive models.

In her early first career as a research fellow at the MRC Cyclotron Unit in London, she used positron emission tomography and mapped for the first time the central vestibular projections in humans. This made a relevant step forward in comprehending the brain mechanisms underlying phenomenological consciousness (study published in Nature). Later, she defined the anatomical bases of anosognosia for hemiplegia, demonstrating, for the first time, that action awareness is implemented in the same network responsible for the primary function to be monitored (study published in Science). Further investigations on the anatomical correlates of disorders of body ownership and motor awareness and their manipulation through diverse stimulations have contributed to giving new hints to restorative and rehabilitative intervention in patients with stroke. More recently, she contributed to the definition of models concerning behavioural and neurobiological plasticity in graceful and pathological ageing.

Author of more than 170 original publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, Gabriella Bottini has an H-Index of 36 according to Scopus. She is also a member of numerous international scientific societies, Editorial Boards and reviewer for many journals and funding agencies. She has been an invited speaker at >200 national/international scientific meetings. Worth of notice, a lecture for the International Neuropsychological Symposium (2004), a lecture at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris (2007), a lecture at the University of Genève (2017), and a TEDx talk on the interplay between Neuroscience and Art in Ferrara (2019).