Maurizio De Pitta
Biography
Scientist, Krembil Research Institute, University Health Network, Toronto, Canada
Assistant Professor, Department of Physiology, Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Scientific Associate, Basque Center for Applied Mathematics, Bilbao, Spain
Adjunct Professor, Department of Neurosciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of the Basque Country, Leioa, Spain
WEBSITE: https://sites.google.com/site/mauriziodepitta/home?authuser=0
Dr. Maurizio De Pitta is a computational neuroscientist specializing in studying neuron-glial interactions. He is the principal investigator at the Neuron-Glial Interaction Lab at the Krembil Research Institute in Toronto (Canada) and holds an Assistant Professor position at the University of Toronto's Department of Physiology, Temerty Faculty of Medicine. He also has affiliations with the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics and the University of the Basque Country in Spain. Dr. De Pitta earned his Ph.D. in Computational Biology from Tel Aviv University and conducted postdoctoral research in Theoretical Neurosciences at The University of Chicago. His research interests range from models of neuron-glial physiology in health and disease in cognition and age-related dementia, using multiple quantitative approaches borrowed from genomics, physics, statistics, and computer science. Dr De Pitta is also a principal investigator in the European H2020 ASTROTECH Consortium to develop forefront glial—brain interfaces and co-founder of the Spanish Clinical System Neuroscience Network, CliSyNe.
Neuron-Glial Molecular Switches Across The Cognitive Spectrum
Healthy brain functions rely on the intricate interaction of neurons with glial cells. Among the latter, astrocytes are ubiquitous in our cortical circuits and can affect synaptic transmission on multiple time scales. On the short time scale, they are responsible, for example, for glutamate clearance, which is critical in setting the tone of neural activity. On a longer time scale, astrocytes operate as endocrine cells, modulating synaptic function by releasing common transmitter molecules. Although different in nature, both pathways may mediate positive feedback on neural activity, resulting in the emergence of multistability. In this scenario, the multiple activity states emerging from neuron-astrocyte interactions could account for various cognitive-related mechanisms in the healthy and diseased brain: from working-memory tasks to dementia-related neural correlates.
