Elia Formisano received his MSc degree in Electronic Engineering in 1996 from the University of Naples (Italy) and in 2000 his PhD from the national (Italian) program in Bioengineering. Thanks to an outgoing grant, in 1998-1999, he was a visiting research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt/Main (with Dr. Rainer Goebel). In January 2000, he was appointed Assistant Professor at Maastricht University (Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience) where he is now Special Professor of Neural Signal Analysis and Head of the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience. He is co-director of the Maastricht Brain Imaging Center (MBIC) and responsible of the MBIC scientific program. In 2000-2002, he was visiting researcher at the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, University of Minnesota, USA (Prof. Kamil Ugurbil) where he pioneered the use of ultra-high magnetic field (7 Tesla) fMRI in studying the functional organization of the human auditory cortex. His research aims at discovering the neural basis of sound processing in human auditory cortex by combining multimodal functional neuroimaging with methods of machine learning and computational modeling. Together with his research group, he studies the neural representation of synthetic (tones) and natural sounds (voice and speech), as well as the processing of complex auditory scenes and music. Methods development focuses on algorithms for unsupervised (e.g. independent component analysis) and supervised (e.g. multivariate classification and regression) learning.

Recent key-publications by Elia Formisano:

1.       Kilian-Hütten N, Valente G, Vroomen J, Formisano E. Auditory cortex encodes the perceptual interpretation of ambiguous sound. (2011) Journal of Neuroscience; 31(5):1715-20.

2.       Riecke, L., Walter, A., Sorger, B., Formisano, E. Tracking vocal pitch through noise: Neural correlates in non-primary auditory cortex. (2011) Journal of Neuroscience; 31(4):1479-88.

3.       Riecke L, Esposito F, Bonte M, Formisano E. (2009) Hearing illusory sounds in noise: The timing of sensory-perceptual transformations in auditory cortex. Neuron, 64, 550-561.

4.       Staeren, N., Renvall, H., De Martino, F., Goebel, R., Formisano, E. (2009) Sound categories are represented as distributed patterns in the human auditory cortex. Current Biology

5. Formisano, E., De Martino, F., Bonte, M., and Goebel, R. (2008). "Who" is saying "what"? Brain-based decoding of human voice and speech. Science 322, 970-973.