Role
Principal Investigator and Tenured Senior Researcher of the Unit for Visually Impaired People (U-VIP) at the Center for Human Technologies (CHT@Erzelli) of the Italian Institute of Technology and Senior Research Scientist IHMC, Florida, USA.
Bio
After graduating in Psychology from the University of Florence in 2004, she continued her training at the CNR VisionLab in Pisa. In 2008, she conducted research at the VisionScience laboratory in Berkeley, and in 2009, she earned a PhD in Humanoid Technologies from the Italian Institute of Technology and the University of Genoa. From 2025 to 2026, she moved to the United States to work as a Senior Research Scientist at IHMC, Florida, USA. She currently works for both IIT and IHMC.
At IIT, she leads the Unit for People with Visual Impairments (U-VIP) as a tenured senior researcher and Principal Investigator. In her laboratory, she analyzes how unisensory and multisensory abilities interact during neurocognitive development in children with and without sensory impairments, particularly sensorimotor perception and low vision .
This biological and psychological knowledge is applied to technology transfer for the design of motor rehabilitation programs and multisensory mechatronic devices. In this context, she coordinated the European projects ABBI and WeDraw, which focused on interactive tools for learning and spatial orientation. She received the European ERC Starting Grant for the MySpace project and a second ERC PoC for iReach. She is the author of numerous book chapters and a large body of international scientific articles.