Dr. Manuela Allegra

Curriculum Vitae

Scopus ID: 54985377400
Manuela Allegra graduated in Neurobiology at the University of Pisa in 2009, with a thesis on the role of the inhibitory GABAergic system on hippocampal hyperexcitability in a mouse model for the autism spectrum disorders (Sgadò et al., 2013). She received her Ph.D. at the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa), where the main focus of her research activity was the study of neuroplasticity mechanisms in physiological and pathological conditions in rodents. Under the supervision of Prof. Matteo Caleo, she used the rodent visual system as a functional and anatomical model for experience-dependent plasticity (Allegra et al., 2014; Deidda, Allegra et al., 2015), she consolidated her expertise on the rodents visual system (Cappello et al., 2012; Tonazzini et al., 2020), and she built a solid background on the processes of adult hippocampal neurogenesis and hippocampal hyperexcitability (Cerri et al., 2016; Allegra et al., 2017; Busti, Allegra et al., 2020). In 2017, Dr. Allegra moved to Paris and joined the laboratory of Dr. Christoph Schmidt-Hieber at the Institut Pasteur. Here she was awarded with the Marie Curie individual fellowship and her research interest was focused on the hippocampal function in memory encoding and recall (Allegra et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2021). In 2020 she was appointed to a permanent research position by the CNR (Italy) and she joined the Department of Biomedical Sciences of the University of Padua. Dr. Allegra has started her own research group with a starting grant from Fondazione CaRiPaRo (Moving Researchers for Pediatrics), in collaboration with Prof. Antonella Viola and Prof. Matteo Caleo.