Maria Concetta Morrone - Biography#

Maria Concetta Morrone graduated in Physics from the University of Pisa in 1977 and trained in Biophysics at the Scuola Normale Superiore from 1973 to 1980. Following research positions in the Department of Psychology of the University of Western Australia, the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, and the CNR Institute of Neuroscience, she was appointed Professor of Psychophysiology in the Faculty of Psychology of the Università Vita-salute S Raffaele Milan in 2000. From 2008 she is Professor of Physiology of the School of Medicine of University of Pisa.

From an initial interest in biophysics and physiology, where she made many seminal contributions, Maria Concetta Morrone moved on to psychophysics and visual perception. Over the years her research has spanned spatial vision, brain development, brain plasticity, attention, color, motion, robotics, vision during eye movements and more recently multisensory perception and action. The research involved the study of both humans and animals using a variety of techniques, including psychophysics, electro-physiology, functional brain imaging, computational modelling and artificial intelligence in a truly interdisciplinary manner. Using this approach, Concetta Morrone has helped understand how we segment visual scenes into functional objects, how the visual brain dynamically interacts with the motor system in crucial moments, such as eye, head and body movements, how the brain plastically reorganizes itself for optimal visual processing during development and neuronal diseases. She has coordinated many European Community grants over many funding schemes, and in 2014 was awarded an ERC-IDEA Advanced Grant for Excellence in Science. She has been a senior member of other two ERC advanced grants.