Beatrice Barra, Ph.D.

Beatrice Barra is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Dmitry Rinberg at the New York University Neuroscience Institute. She received her M.Sc. in biomedical engineering from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and her Ph.D. in medical sciences from the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). During her doctoral studies under the supervision of Dr. Marco Capogrosso, she focused on developing a spinal cord stimulation protocol that successfully restored arm and hand movement in non-human primates with cervical spinal cord injury. During her Ph.D., she was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship to spend 18 months at the University of Pittsburgh, where she developed spinal cord stimulation protocols to restore naturalistic tactile sensation in subjects with sensory impairments. While studying how stimulation of the sensory system can restore sensation, she developed a particular interest in the neural encoding of sensory information, and she is now focusing her postdoctoral research on the neural encoding of sensation intensity. Specifically, she aims at understanding how the mouse olfactory bulb encodes the intensity of olfactory information in the early stages of sensory processing.