Dr. Melissa Serrano

Melissa graduated in Neurobiology and Applied Biomedicine at Pisa University, Italy, in 2012, with a thesis on parvalbumin-expressing interneuron plasticity in neocortical areas upon hippocampal-dependent learning.

In 2013, Melissa joined the laboratory of Professor Pico Caroni at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland, as a graduate student. She was awarded her Ph.D. in Neuroscience in 2019. Her doctoral thesis research combined behaviour with molecular biology, viral silencing and tracing approaches in mice, and focused on the role of the retrosplenial cortex and related thalamo-striatal regions in strategy updating and behavioural flexibility.

After being awarded a fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation, Melissa joined the Dupret Group in 2022. For her research at the Unit, Melissa will be using high-density in vivo electrophysiological recordings to investigate how the hippocampus and connected cortical and subcortical regions coordinate their activity to support learning and adaptive behaviour.

Melissa believes it is crucial to study and understand mnemonic processes in relation to the behaviour they generate, and wishes to do so by taking a system-level approach.