FACTO

            
ISA

            
TRANCOSO

            
ASA Art and Technology

            
BRIEF BIOS
          

            
Alessandro E. P. Villa graduated at the Faculty of Science
            of the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) where he received
            the Ph.D. in Neurophysiology in 1988 with a Thesis on the thalamo-cortical
            system. He studied Computer Science at the Swiss Federal School
            of Technology and received the Master degree in Applied Computer
            Science in 1990. Between 1990 and 1994 A. Villa was postdoctoral
            fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, at the Brain Research
            Institute of the University of California at Los Angeles, deputy
            head of the Laboratory of Clinical Electrophysiology at Fidia
            Research Laboratories (Padova, Italy), and was invited as Senior
            Research Scientist at the Research Centre in Cognitive Neuroscience
            of the CNRS in Marseille (France). In 1994 he received the Young
            Investigator Award by the Swiss Society for Biological Psychiatry
            and in 1995 he founded the Laboratory of Neuroheuristic at the
            department of physiology of the Medical School at the University
            of Lausanne. This laboratory developed a new path towards understanding
            higher brain functions through a transdisciplinary approach that
            integrates neuroscience, molecular biology, physiology and computer
            science with grants from the University of Lausanne, Swiss National
            Science Foundation, Swiss Federal Office for Education and Science,
            European Union funded projects (in FP3, FP5 and FP6), INTAS,
            U.S. National Science Foundation, British Medical Council and
            several private foundations. In 2001 Prof. Villa moved to the
            University "Joseph Fourier" of Grenoble (France) as
            Chair of Neuroscience and Biophysics at the Faculty of Medicine,
            where he leads the NeuroHeuristics Research Group <http://www.nhrg.org>,
            an interdisciplinary team within the field of clinical and preclinical
            neuroscience at the Inserm (the French National Institute of
            Health). He has recently been visiting professor at the University
            "Pablo de Olavide" in Sevilla (Spain), National University
            of Singapore and invited professor of Computer Science and Management
            at the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of
            Lausanne