Speaker
Description
Brain disease is a major global health challenge, calling for new tools to probe the interplay between neural activity, neuromodulator dynamics, and molecular alterations. Understanding brain mechanisms requires both functional and biochemical measurements, yet current approaches largely rely on optical methods using genetically encoded reporters, which limit translational potential. Reporter-free Raman spectroscopy offers powerful local molecular sensing but remains underused in neuroscience research due to a lack of deployable platforms for small animals. In this talk, we present photonic approaches leveraging label-free light-matter interactions to capture molecular signatures in the mouse brain, combining vibrational tissue imaging with novel optical systems designed to enable deep brain recordings via vibrational photometry, laying the groundwork for future studies in basic and preclinical brain research.
Chiara Guidolin is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Padua. She earned her PhD in Physics from Université Paris-Saclay in 2022, where she studied pressure-driven coarsening in complex foams, uncovering how liquid-phase elasticity impacts foam structure and bubble dynamics. From 2022 to 2025, she conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Milan, extending her expertise to active matter physics and collective cell migration in tumorigenic cell assemblies, combining advanced image analysis with soft-matter-inspired theoretical models to shed new light on the mechanisms behind breast cancer metastasis. Building on her background in soft, active matter and quantitative biophysics, in 2025 she joined the Neurolidar group at the University of Padua, developing new neurophotonic technologies for label-free bio-molecular optical sensing in deep regions of the living brain.
