Simone Tonetto, M.S.

Research Interests

Simone Tonetto is a graduate student from the Psychiatric Center Copenhagen and the Department of Neuroscience at Copenhagen University and joined the lab in October 2022 for a 3-month research project. The complex nature of the brain has always fascinated him, from its ability to overcome any imaginable limits in endurance sports, to its weakness in falling into substance dependence. He is really interested in understanding the links between the complex neural circuitry and behavior, probing the spatiotemporal patterns of neuromodulatory signals in the brain during behavior and the causal relationships between these.

In his undergraduate studies, he focused on characterizing the role of Hif-1a and VEGF in murine cellular models of Huntington’s disease and during his master’s thesis at Lund University, he studied the psychiatric aspects of Huntington’s disease and the role of oxytocin and vasopressin as potential biomarkers. His current graduate project, under the supervision of Dr. Morgane Thomsen, aims at investigating the potential beneficial effects of ketogenic treatments for long term alcohol withdrawal symptoms. He is implementing a fiber photometry system to investigate the neuronal dynamics involved in alcohol dependence, withdrawal and relapse.