Biosketch: Gabriele Chelini is currently a fixed-term investigator at the Neuroscience Institute of CNR (National Research Council of Italy) in Pisa in the laboratory of Dr. Alessandro Sale, funded by the “piano nazionale di ripresa e resilienza”, within the AgeIT network. His work aims to uncover behavioral predictors of cognitive decline in rodents. Dr. Chelini obtained his master degree in psychology in 2012, with a thesis dissertation titled “learning, memory and synaptic plasticity in a mouse model with altered maturation of dendritic spines”. He joined the international Ph.D. program “Dottorato Toscano di Neuroscienze”, funded by “Regione Toscana”, in 2012. During the first two years of Ph.D., under the supervision of prof. Tommaso Pizzorusso, he mastered in-vivo and ex-vivo electrophysiology to study the abnormalities of primary sensory regions in transgenic mouse models of neurodevelopmental disorders. During the last year of his Ph.D., Dr. Chelini joined the laboratory of prof. Michela Fagiolini (Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical school) for an 8 months internship, learning new optical imaging tools to study brain disorders in rodents. Thanks to this experience, Dr. Chelini re-directed his research interest into the field of biological psychiatry. To do so, he joined the Translational Neuroscience laboratory (TNL - Mclean Hospital, Harvard Medical School) led by Dr. Sabina Berretta in 2016. In this lab he spent four years studying the interplay between glia, extracellular matrix, and neurons in the context of synaptic plasticity and psychiatric disorders. The main achievements of Dr. Chelini work in the TNL lab are summarized in a work titled “Focal clusters of peri-synaptic matrix contribute to activity-dependent plasticity and memory in mice”, recently published in the journal Cell Reports. Dr. Chelini returned to Italy in 2021 to work in the laboratory of Prof. Yuri Bozzi (Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento) and was timely awarded with a two-years postdoctoral fellowship to study the interplay between early-life adversities and genetic vulnerabilities in the emergence of psychiatric hallmarks, in a rodent model. The first research outcome of his work in Prof. Bozzi lab is a paper titled “Automated Segmentation of the Mouse Body Language to Study Stimulus-Evoked Emotional Behaviors”, published in 2023 on the journal eNeuro. Dr. Chelini joined his new position at the neuroscience institute of the Italian CNR in February 2024.
Roles: Spoke 2 contributor, Spoke 2 WP 5 contributor
Contacts: gabriele.chelini@in.cnr.it
Website: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gabriele-Chelini
Research interests