Dr Enrico Amico | The Quest For Brain Identification

This seminar is free to attend and is open to all, both within and outside the University. Attendance is possible both in-person and on Zoom, details of Zoom registration and physical location can be found above.

We are delighted to announce that the Centre for Human Brain Health (CHBH) will welcome Dr Enrico Amico, Research Group Leader (AmicoLab) and Lecturer in Neuroscience at Aston Institute of Health and Neurodelelopment at Aston University to present a hybrid CHBH Seminar, taking place on the date and time above. His full biography can be found below.

To arrange a 1:1 meeting with the speaker, please state your interest in the Zoom registration link above, or email chbh@contacts.bham.ac.uk. 

CHBH Event Host
Prof Andrew Bagshaw

The Quest For Brain Identification 

Abstract

In the 17th century, physician Marcello Malpighi observed the existence of distinctive patterns of ridges and sweat glands on fingertips. This was a major breakthrough, and originated a long and continuing quest for ways to uniquely identify individuals based on fingerprints, a technique massively used until today. It is only in the past few years that technologies and methodologies have achieved high-quality measures of an individual’s brain to the extent that personality traits and behavior can be characterized. The concept of “fingerprints of the brain” is very novel and has been boosted thanks to a seminal publication by Finn et al. in 2015. They were among the firsts to show that an individual’s functional brain connectivity profile is both unique and reliable, similarly to a fingerprint, and that it is possible to identify an individual among a large group of subjects solely on the basis of her or his connectivity profile. Yet, the discovery of brain fingerprints opened up a plethora of new questions. In particular, what exactly is the information encoded in brain connectivity patterns that ultimately leads to correctly differentiating someone’s connectome from anybody else’s? In other words, what makes our brains unique? In this talk I am going to partially address these open questions while keeping a personal viewpoint on the subject. I will outline the main findings, discuss potential issues, and propose future directions in the quest for identifiability of human brain networks.

Speaker Biography

Dr. Enrico Amico is a physicist who graduated from the University Federico II of Naples, Italy. After earning his Master's in 2012, he decided to follow his passion for the scientific study of consciousness. He enrolled in a joint PhD program between the Coma Science Group of Prof. Steven Laureys at University of Liège, and the Marinazzo Lab at the University of Ghent. During his four years there as a PhD student he mainly focused on implementing new methods for brain connectivity assessment across levels of consciousness. In 2016 he joined the CONNplexity Lab (headed by Prof. Joaquín Goñi) at Purdue University as a Postdoctoral researcher, where he made contributions on proposing new network science models for functional and structural brain connectomics. In 2020 he joined EPFL an SNSF Ambizione Fellow, where he was Principal Investigator on different research lines in brain networks and brain connectomics, and where he has co-authored publications in Nature Physics, Nature Communications, Science Advances, NeuroImage, and Network Neuroscience. He is currently Lecturer at Aston University Birmingham, where he leads his lab on advanced models in connectomics.

This seminar is free to attend and is open to all, both within and outside the University. Attendance is possible both in-person and on Zoom, details of Zoom registration and physical location can be found above.