CRIS student Tommaso Menara was awarded the Best Student Paper Award at the 2019 American Control Conference, which took place in Philadelphia in July. Tommaso is a student in Prof. Pasqualetti's lab and his research lies at the intersection between control theory and network neuroscience.
Motivated by experimental recordings of synchronization phenomena in the human brain, Tommaso's paper explores conditions for the onset of cluster synchronization of nonlinear oscillators. A deeper understanding of the mechanisms enabling cluster synchronization might not only shed light on the nature of healthy brain functions, but also enable and guide targeted interventions for patients with neurological disorders. On the right, is an example of synchronization patterns of neural activity that appear in the correlation matrix of the recorded signals.