Candidates for Committee

Stephanie Clarke and Leonardo Chelazzi

Autobiographical sketches

After obtaining his medical degree in Florence (Italy) in 1984, Leonardo Chelazzi began his scientific career at the Institute of Physiology, University of Verona (Italy), under the supervision of Prof. G. Berlucchi and Prof. C.A. Marzi. In 1996 he moved to the Department of Anatomy and Physiology of the University of Turin, where he completed a Ph.D. in Neuroscience with Prof. P. Strata. In 1990 he joined the Laboratory of Neuropsychology at NIMH-NIH (Bethesda, USA), working as a post-doc in the group of Dr. R. Desimone. In 1994 he returned to Verona to become assistant professor of Psychology in the Department of Neurological and Vision Sciences. He is now associate professor of Neurophysiology at the same department. Throughout his scientific career, his research interests have covered the cognitive neuroscience of visual perception, visual selective attention and memory. He has taken a number of approaches to investigate these topics, including behavioural experiments in humans and the recording of single neurones from awake, behaving macaques. His main contributions concern the functional interplay between memory and attention mechanisms in the primate brain. LC is member of a number of scientific societies, including the European Brain and Behaviour Society and the Society for Neuroscience. He serves regularly as ad-hoc referee for several journals, including Science, Neuropsychologia and Experimental Brain Research. He leads an active and independent research group in Verona, which includes five postdoctoral fellows and two undergraduate students. In addition to receiving financial support from the Italian Government, the Italian National Research Council and the University of Verona, he has been awarded grants from the Human Frontier Science Program and the McDonnell-Pew Cognitive Neuroscience Program. He maintains stable collaborations with a number of colleagues in Europe and North America. In 1999 he received the Novartis Neuroscience award for Italian young investigator.

Stephanie Clarke is Professor and Head of Neuropsychology at the Medical Faculty in Lausanne. She received her medical training in Lausanne and received the "Henri-Ed. de Cérenville" prize for her doctoral thesis on the development of callosal connections. She later started to work on the human cerebral cortex, making use of the Nauta method to trace callosal connections in man and defining thus anatomically visual areas. Her current work concerns the functional organisation of the human auditory cortex and combines different approaches. Anatomical studies using histochemical staining methods and tracing of neural connections helped to identify several putative auditory areas outside the primary auditory cortex. Activation studies in normal subjects and neuropsychological studies in patients with focal lesions demonstrated two distinct processing pathways the What and Where aspects of sound analysis. S. Clarke is a long-standing and enthusiastic EBBS member. In 1999 she co-organised (together with A. Grabowska and M. Regard) the rather successful EBBS workshop "Hemispheric specialisation and compensatory strategies in brain disorders" (Monte Verita, Switzerland), and in 2000 the FENS symposium "Processing in human auditory cortex". For the forthcoming EBBS meeting in Marseille she is the organiser of the symposium "Parallel and hierarchical processing in human audition". S. Clarke is member of the Swiss Society for Neuroscience council.

Susan J. Sara  (Newsletter 2001)