Alexandra Battaglia-Mayer
(Sapienza U. Rome)
Alexandra Battaglia-Mayer obtained her laurea degree in Mathematics from the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, and received her PhD in Behavioral Neurophysiology from the same university. During 1998-2000, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Brain Sciences Center of the University of Minnesota, MN, USA, investigating neural basis of higher-order motor functions in the macaque monkeys. Back in Rome, she combined behavioral, neurophysiology and computational approaches to study directional movements in the macaque monkeys working at the Scientific Institute for Research, Hospitalization and Health Care, Rome, Italy. Since 2005, she is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. Using combination of behavioral, neurophysiological, and computational methods her research aims at understanding the function of the parietal and frontal cortex. Dr. Battaglia-Mayer investigates the neurobiological basis of cortical control of movement, with particular emphasis on the neural mechanisms of eye-hand coordination, on-line control of movement, and specification of the dynamic force underlying hand-object interaction. Recently, social cognition became a new focus of her research, with the aim to explore the neural basis of motor coordination during different forms of joint-action between interacting subjects.