Personale docente

Giuseppe Di Cesare

Date of birth: 9th June 1983
Place of birth: Matera
Nationality: Italian
Email: giuseppe.dicesare@unipr.it
Websites: People details - IIT Vitality Lab

PERSONAL
INFORMATION

• EDUCATION
2015 PhD in Neuroscience, University of Parma, Italy, March 2015
Final dissertation: The neural correlates of vitality forms
(Supervisor: Prof. Giacomo Rizzolatti)

2010 Master’s Degree (110/110 cum laude) in Biology, University of Roma Tre, Italy, July 2010.

2008 Bachelor degree in Biology, University of Roma Tre, Italy, July 2008.

• OTHER PROFESSIONAL
TITLES
2022 Habilitation as Associate Professor according to the Italian National Scientific Habilitation Procedure (ASN) for the scientific sector of Physiology.

• PROFESSIONAL AND HONORARY APPOINTMENTS
2019 – Now Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Cognitive Architecture for Collaborative Technologies Unit, Italian Institute of Technology, Genova (Italy).
2018 – 2019 Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Istituto di Neuroscienze, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Parma (Italy).

2016 – 2018 Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Department of Robotics Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Italian Institute of Technology, Genova (Italy).

2015 – 2016 Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Department of Neuroscience, University of Parma (Italy).

2014 Visiting Student, Maastricht Brain Imaging Centre (Netherlands).

2013 Visiting Student, Perceptual Robotics Laboratory (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy).

• SCIENTIFIC AWARDS
2022 ERC Starting Grant, proposal favorably reviewed in Step 1 of the evaluation process (score A, project n° 101077805).

2021 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships, proposal awarded with a Seal of Excellence (project n° 101026322; evaluation score 93.8/100).

2019 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships, proposal awarded with a Seal of Excellence (project n° 840877; evaluation score 91/100).

2018 Selected Participant to the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Satellite Event, “Communication Training” (Toulouse).

2010 Master’s degree award received from University of Roma Tre, Rome (Italy).

• SUPERVISING AND MENTORING
2012 – now Supervision of 2 PhD students (Antonino Errante, Giada Lombardi) at University of Parma and Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy;
Supervisor of 9 Master students (Giulia Guidetti, Francesco Campo, Simona Patierno, Settimio Ziccarelli, Silvia Aresta, Giada Lombardi, Amrita Suresh; Anna Vitale, Silvia Aquino) 7 at University of Parma and two at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy.

• ORGANISATION OF SCIENTIFIC MEETINGS
2022 Organizer of the selected symposium: Understanding the affective state of others: the role of vitality forms. Associazione Italiana Scienze Cognitive (AISC), Parma, Italy.

2022 Organizer of the selected symposium: From humans to robots: the role of vitality forms in social interactions. Societá Italiana di Psicofisiologia (SIPF), Udine, Italy.

2022 Organizer of the workshop: Affective perception and design. AMD Hamburg Department of Design, Hochschule Fresenius, University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg.

• INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES
2020 – now Member of the Ethical Committee at Department of Cognitive Science, Psychology, Education and Cultural Studies, University of Messina, Italy.

2020 – now Member of the fMRI Scientific Committee, University of Parma, Italy.

2020 – now Tutor of the PhD program in Bioingeneering and Robotics, cycle XXXVI – University of Genoa - research theme: Cortical Networks for affective communication in human-robot interaction.

• REVIEWING ACTIVITIES
2021 – n o w Editorial Board, Frontiers in Psychology (Review Editor).

• MEMBERSHIPS OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES
2016 – now Ordinary Member, Italian Society for neuroscience (SINS).

2022 Ordinary Member, Societá Italiana di Psicofisiologia e Neuroscienze Cognitive (SIPF).

• CLINICAL RESEARCH PROJECTS
1. Azienda USL di Parma, Title of the research: “Studio della percezione ed esecuzione di azioni sociali in pazienti affetti da disturbo borderline di personalità e disturbo bipolare”. Duration of the project: 2022 – 2024.

2. Istituto per la Ricerca e l’Innovazione Biomedica (IRIB), Messina. Title of the research: Vitality: espressione e comprensione delle diverse forme di vitalità delle azioni in bambini con sviluppo tipico e con Disturbo dello Spettro dell’Autismo (ASD). Duration of the project: 2021 – 2023.

3. Azienda USL – IRCCS of Reggio Emilia (Italy). Research based on an fMRI study aiming to study the activation of the Mirror Neuron System in children with unilateral cerebral palsy.
Project completed with the following research publication: Errante A, Di Cesare G, Pinardi C, Fasano F, Sghedoni S, Costi S, Ferrari A, Fogassi L. Mirror Neuron System Activation in Children With Unilateral Cerebral Palsy During Observation of Actions Performed by a Pathological Model. (2019) Neurorehabil Neural Repair. 33(6):419-431.

4. IRCCS Children’s Hospital Bambino Gesù, Rome (Italy). Scientific Director Prof. Stefano Vicari. Research on the perception of action vitality forms in children with ASD by using a psychophysical approach.
Project completed with the following research publication: Di Cesare G., Sparaci L., Pelosi A., Mazzone L., Giovagnoli G., Menghini D., Ruffaldi E., Vicari S. (2017). Differences in vitality forms recognition in children with autism spectrum disorders. Frontiers in Psychology, 8:1456. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01456.

• OTHER MAJOR RESEARCH COLLABORATIONS
1. PhD Massimo Marchi, Research on processing of speech vitality forms aiming to understand the insular activation by using fMRI (sparse sampling). Department of Computer Science, University of Milan, Milan (Italy).

2. PhD Valentina Cuccio, Research on language aiming to study the motor resonance in the processing of human and robotic voices. University of Palermo, Department of Humanities, Palermo, (Italy).

3. Prof. Rainer Goebel, Research on action style aiming to understand the insular activity by using multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA). Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University (Nederland).

4. PhD Emanuele Ruffaldi, Research on action style aiming to create a spectrum of different action vitality forms by using the VICON system. Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Perceptual Robotics Laboratory, Pisa (Italy).

EXPERTISE
fMRI From 2010 to the present, I have collected and analysed functional brain images of 794 participants that took part in several experiments using different paradigms (Motor, Visual, Language, Auditory, Touch and Motor Imagery tasks).
Analysis: Univariate and Multivoxel Pattern analysis (MVPA); functional connectivity (PPI); effective connectivity (DCM).

DTI Analysis of tractography to trace the tracts possibly connecting the insula with the parieto-frontal nodes.

Kinematics Recording Systems: 3D-optoelectronic SMART system, VICON, OptiTrack.
Analysis of movement parameters (MATLAB software).

Electromyography Recording of the arm muscles activity during fMRI acquisition (BrainAmp system)
Analysis of the EMG signal (EEGLAB software).

Psychophysics Recording of reaction times during the observation, planning and execution of goal directed actions performed with different vitality forms.

PUBLICATION RECORD Total publications in International Peer-reviewed Journals: 23.
Publications as first or last author: 18; as co-author: 5.
Citations: Overall=368, h-index=12 (Info from Scopus, 2 December 2022).

PUBLICATIONS
1. Lombardi G., Gerbella M., Marchi M., Sciutti A., Rizzolatti G., Di Cesare G. (2022) Investigating form and content of emotional and non-emotional laughing. Cereb Cortex, doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhac334. Epub ahead of print.

2. Lombardi G., Zenzeri J., Belgiovine G., Vannucci F., Rea F., Sciutti A., Di Cesare G. (2021). The influence of vitality forms on action perception and motor response. Scientific Reports, 11(1):22576. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-01924-w.

3. Di Cesare G., Marchi M., Lombardi G., Gerbella M., Sciutti, A., Rizzolatti G. (2021). The middle cingulate cortex and dorso-central insula: a mirror circuit encoding observation and execution of vitality forms. Proceedings of the National Academic Science of the United States of America, 118(44):e2111358118. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2111358118.

4. Di Cesare G, Pelosi A, Aresta S., Lombardi G., Sciutti, A. (2021). Affective contagion: how attitudes expressed by others influence our perception of actions. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 15:712550. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2021.712550.

5. Di Cesare G., Cuccio V., Marchi M, Sciutti A., Rizzolatti G. (2021). Communicative and affective components in processing auditory vitality forms: An fMRI study. Cerebral Cortex, bhab255. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhab255.

6. Rizzolatti, G., D’Alessio, A., Marchi, M., Di Cesare, G. (2021). The neural bases of tactile vitality forms and their modulation by social context. Scientific Reports, 11(1):9095. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-87919-z.

7. Di Cesare G., Vannucci F., Rea F., Sciutti A., Sandini G. (2020) How attitudes generated by humanoid robots shape human brain activity. Scientific Reports, 10(1):16928.

8. Gerbella M., Pinardi C., Di Cesare G., Rizzolatti G., Caruana F. (2020). Two neural networks for laughing: a tractograpy study. Cerebral Cortex, https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhaa264.

9. Di Cesare G., Gerbella M., Rizzolatti G. (2020). The neural basis of vitality forms. National Science Review doi.org/10.1093/nsr/nwz187.
10. Di Cesare G., Pinardi C., Marchi M., Rizzolatti G. (2019). Understanding the attitude of others by hearing action sounds: the role of the insula. Scientific Reports. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-50609-y.

11. Errante A., Di Cesare G., Pinardi C., Fasano F., Sghedoni S., Costi S., Ferrari A., Fogassi L. (2019) Mirror Neuron System Activation in Children With Unilateral Cerebral Palsy During Observation of Actions Performed by a Pathological Mode. Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair. doi/10.1177/1545968319847964.

12. Vannucci F., Di Cesare G., Rea F., Sandini G., Sciutti A. (2018) A Robot with Style: Can Robotic Attitudes Influence Human Actions? IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, doi 10.1109/HUMANOIDS.2018.8625004

13. Di Cesare G., Pinardi C., Carapelli C., Caruana F., Marchi M., Gerbella M., Rizzolatti G. (2018). Insula connections with the parieto-frontal circuit for generating arm actions in humans and macaque monkeys. Cereb Cortex. 2018. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhy095.

14. Di Cesare G., De Stefani E., Gentilucci M., De Marco D. (2017). Vitality forms expressed by others modulate our own motor response:a kinematic study. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 11:565. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2017.00565.

15. Di Cesare G., Sparaci L., Pelosi A., Mazzone L., Giovagnoli G., Menghini D., Ruffaldi E., Vicari S. (2017). Differences in vitality forms recognition in children with autism spectrum disorders. Frontiers in Psychology, 8:1456. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01456.

16. Di Cesare G., Errante A., Marchi M., Cuccio V. (2017). Language for action: motor resonance during the processing of human and robotic voices. Brain and Cognition, (118) 18-27.

17. Di Cesare G., Marchi M., Errante A., Fasano F., Rizzolatti G. (2017). Mirroring the social aspects of speech and actions: the role of the insula. Cerebral Cortex, 1-10.

18. Di Cesare G., Fasano F., Errante A., Marchi M., Rizzolatti G. (2016). Understanding the internal states of others by listening to action verbs. Neuropsychologia, 89:172-9.

19. Di Cesare G., Di Dio C., Valente G., Ruffaldi E., Bergamasco M., Goebel R., Rizzolatti G. (2016).Vitality form processing in the insula during action observation: a multivoxel pattern analysis. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10:267.

20. Di Dio C., Ardizzi M., Massaro D., Di Cesare G., Gilli G., Marchetti A., Gallese V., (2016). Human, Nature, Dynamism: The Effects of Content and Movement Perception on Brain Activations during the Aesthetic Judgment of Representational Paintings. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9:705.

21. Di Cesare G., Di Dio C., Marchi M., Rizzolatti G. (2015). Expressing our internal states and understanding those of others. Proceedings of the National Academic Science of the United States of America (PNAS), 112(33).

22. Di Cesare G., Di Dio C., Rochat MJ., Sinigaglia C., Bruschweiler-Stern N., Stern DN., Rizzolatti G. (2013). The neural correlates of “vitality form” recognition: an fMRI study. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(7):951-60.

23. Di Dio C., Di Cesare G., Higuchi S., Roberts N., Vogt S., Rizzolatti G. (2012). The neural correlates of velocity processing during the observation of a biological effector in the parietal and premotor cortex. Neuroimage, 64, 425-436.

PRESENTATIONS
1. Sciutti A., Lombardi G., Ruta L., Di Cesare G., From humans to robots: the role of vitality forms in social interactions. Societá Italiana di Psicofisiologia (SIPF), Udine, Italy, Symposium.

2. Di Cesare G., Lombardi G., Tartarisco G., Sciutti A., Understanding the affective state of others: the role of vitality forms. Associazione Italiana Scienze Cognitive (AISC), Italy, Symposium.

3. Di Cesare G., Lombardi G. Affective perception and design. AMD Hamburg Department of Design, Hochschule Fresenius, University of Applied Sciences (Hamburg 2022). Workshop.

4. Di Cesare G. The role of vitality forms in social interaction. AMD Hamburg Department of Design, Hochschule Fresenius, University of Applied Sciences (Hamburg 2022). Oral Presentation

5. Di Cesare G., Lombardi G.., Marchi M.,., Gerbella M., Sciutti A., Rizzolatti G. Evidence of mirror mechanism for vitality forms encoding in the insula and cingulate cortices (SINS, 2021), Poster Presentation.

6. Di Cesare G. The functional magnetic resonance.Webinar, Department of Cognitive Sciences, Psychology, Education and Cultural Studies (Messina, 2020), Oral Presentation.

7. Di Cesare G., Urgesi C., Craighero L. Agent’s and observer’s motivational states modulate motor resonance. XXVI Congresso Società Italiana di Psicofisica e Neuroscienze Cognitive (Turin, 2018), Oral Presentation.

8. Di Cesare G. Breaking the wall of social communication. Falling Walls Lab (Rome, 2018). Oral Presentation

9. Di Cesare G. How the brain shapes the way we act. Marie Skłodowska-Curie Satellite Event ESOF (Toulouse, 2018), Oral Presentation.

10. Di Cesare G. The role of the insular cortex in human interactions: past, present and future perspectives. EuroScience Open Forum (Toulouse, 2018), Poster Presentation.

11. Di Cesare G., Pinardi C., Carapelli C., Caruana F., Gerbella M., Rizzolatti G. Insula connections with the parieto-frontal mirror circuit in humans and monkeys. Society for Neuroscience (Washington DC, 2017), Poster Presentation.

12. Di Cesare G., Marchi M., Errante A., Rizzolatti G. Mirroring the action style across auditory and visual modalities. X Fens Forum Of Neuroscience (Copenhagen, 2016), Poster Presentation.

13. Errante A., Di Cesare G., Fasano F., Costi S., Sghedoni S., Bressi B., Volpe V., Pinardi C., Ferrari A., Fogassi L. Modulating the motor system by action observation in right hemiplegic cerebral palsy: an fMRI study. XXIV National Congress of the Italian Society of Psychophysiology (Milan, 2016), Poster Presentation.

14. Di Cesare G., Di Dio C., Marchi M., Rizzolatti G. The neural basis of vitality forms: an fMRI study. Images of the mind: new frontiers in brain imaging advanced fMRI statistical methods and their applications (Milan, 2015), Poster Presentation.

15. Di Cesare G., Di Dio C., Marchi M., Rizzolatti G. Insular representation of the vitality forms during observation, imagination and execution. The social Brain Conference (Copenhagen, 2014). Poster Presentation and Talk.

16. Di Cesare G., Di Dio C., Valente G., Ruffaldi E. Rude – Neutral – Gentle: looking through the style of action. IX Fens Forum Of Neuroscience (Milan, 2014), Poster Presentation.

17. Di Cesare G., Di Dio C., Rochat M., Sinigaglia C., Bruschweiler N., Stern D., Rizzolatti G. The neural correlates of vitality forms recognition: an fMRI study. Mirror Neurons: new frontiers 20 years after their discovery (Erice, 2012), Poster Presentation.

REVIEW ACTIVITIES
Editorial Board, Frontiers in Psychology (Review Editor) 2021-present

BOOKS AND CHAPTERS
Di Cesare G. (2019). Capire gli stati d’animo degli altri (Understanding the internal states of others). Diabasis, ISBN: 9788881039364

Di Cesare G. (2020). The importance of the affective component in action understanding. In: Modelling human motion: from human perception to robot design, Noceti N., Sciutti A., Rea F. (Eds.), Springer, p:103-113.