Italian physiologist, academic and author
Giovanni Berlucchi is an Italian physiologist, academic, and author. He is a professor Emeritus at the Department of Neurosciences, Biomedicine, and Movement Sciences at the University of Verona.[1]
Biography
Berlucchi was born in the Lombard city of Pavia on 25 May 1935, to Carlo Berlucchi, a clinical neurologist, and Elsa Baraldi.[2]
After earning a degree in medicine from the University of Pavia in 1959, Berlucchi began his scientific and academic career at the University of Pisa under the neurophysiologist Giuseppe Moruzzi. From 1964 to 1965 he did postdoctoral work at the California Institute of Technology as a fellow of the U.S. National Health Institute and under Roger Wolcott Sperry who introduced him to the corpus callosum and to the functions of the brain hemispheres. In 1968 he joined as a research associate the Department of Anatomy of the University of Pennsylvania chaired by James M. Sprague. After becoming a full professor of physiology at the University of Siena in 1975, he occupied the same position at the University of Pisa from 1976 to 1983[3] and at the University of Verona from 1983 until retirement in 2010.[1]
Following an initial involvement in the physiological study of the sleep-wake cycle,[4] Berlucchi's research work has centered on the neural bases of cognition and behavior, with personal contributions to such fields as the interactions and functional differences between the cerebral hemispheres, vision and visuospatial attention,[5] and the representation of the body by the brain. He has also conducted research on the historical development of neuropsychology and particularly of the neuroscientific thinking about cerebral organization and its plasticity.[6][7]
Berlucchi has held several editorial appointments, including the editor-in-chief of Neuropsychologia, from 1993 to 1998. He was among the founders of the European Neuroscience Association and its journal, The European Journal of Neuroscience. He has co-authored the book Neurofobia with Salvatore Aglioti. He has contributed to many handbooks including Handbook of Sensory Physiology, Handbook of Psychobiology, Handbook of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, Handbook of Clinical Neurology.
Berlucchi is a national fellow of Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei[8] and an elected member of Academia Europaea from 1990. He is a member of several other scientific and cultural institutions, including the Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana, the Istituto Lombardo di Scienze Lettere ed Arti and the Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti. His autobiography is published in The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography, a book series of the Society for Neuroscience.[9]
