Brief Biography
Laura Ballerini graduated (MD) at the Università di Firenze, Italy in 1988. She was a Post-doc at UCL from 1991 and later became assistant professor in Physiology at the Biophysics Sector of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA-ISAS) of Trieste, Italy in 1995. In 2002 Laura Ballerini became associate professor in Physiology at the Università di Trieste, Italy. She has been working for several years on the physiology of spinal cord neurons/spinal cord networks and has vast experience in using a variety of experimental electrophysiological techniques and in vitro model systems. Laura Ballerini has provided important contribution to the understanding of spinal network physiology, plasticity and development. In her laboratory at UniTS she developed and is currently using the organotypic slice cultures from the rat/mouse spinal cord as a model system. Recently, Laura Ballerini has been working on the interactions between living neurons and micro-nano fabricated substrates or bioactive-composite containing carbon nanotubes.She demonstrated that carbon nanotubes substrates boost neuronal network activity under chronic growth conditions by enhancing the occurrence of spontaneous postsynaptic currents. Since 2006 Laura Ballerini is coordinating an EU project (www.neuronano.net) designed to exploit the convergence of nanotechnology and neurobiology in view of the development of novel neuro-implantable devices to treat neurological traumatic and degenerative lesions.