Anna Ipata

MT School for Advanced Studies Lucca (Italy)

The role of the cerebellum in learning new visuomotor association tasks

2019-2020: Fall

Anna Ipata earned her medical degree with a specialization in Child Neurology and Psychiatry from the School of Medicine of the University of Pisa, Italy. She got her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Verona, Italy and completed post-doctoral research in the laboratory of Michael Goldberg at the National Institutes of Health. She worked as a research scientist in Michael Goldberg's laboratory in the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University in New York. She is currently a visiting fellow at the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy. 

During her residency, Anna Ipata conducted research aimed towards the study of the visual functions in children with lesions of the visual cortex. As a PhD student, she studied the neuronal mechanisms of visual attention in primates by recording the activity of single neurons in the extrastriate visual cortex. In the laboratory of Professor Goldberg at the NIH, and later at Columbia University, she investigated the neuronal activity of visual search and eye movements by recording the activity of single neurons in the parietal cortex in monkeys. She is currently performing research in Professor Goldberg's laboratory focused on the study of the role of the cerebellum in visual motor learning by recording the activity of single units in the monkey’s cerebellum. In addition to her research, Anna Ipata works as a volunteer for the NGO Doctors for Africa where she is the co-PI of a project in the hospital of Tosamaganga, Iringa, Tanzania, aimed at improving the early detection of neurological impairment in newborns and infants.