Who am I?

Pierre Gianferrara presenting his poster at the 2023 Neural Control of Movement (NCM) annual meeting.

My name is Pierre Gianferrara. I was born in Nice in the south of France and grew up in a town near Paris called Rueil-Malmaison, as well as in Saint-Julien-en-Genevois at the border of Switzerland. Growing up, music was really important to me. I played the piano and participated in a number of music competitions throughout France. In addition to music, I’ve always had a strong interest in psychology and the mind, and was particularly eager to discover and explore new cultures. Over the past thirteen years, I have been traveling the world and lived in 5 different countries including France, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States.

After completing my French Baccalauréat, I first went to Montreal, QC (Canada) where I pursued a Bachelor’s degree in cognitive science at McGill University. I was fascinated by the interdisciplinary study of the mind, and thus strove to learn about each sub-field of cognitive science. In addition, I had the amazing opportunity to engage in music cognition research through undergraduate projects on orchestration and music performance, which enabled me to actively combine my interests in music and psychology. After graduating from an Honours degree in cognitive science at McGill, I completed a Master’s degree in Informatics & Cognitive Science with a “Neuroinformatics” specialization at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland (UK). I then applied some of the computational skills I learned during my Master’s to a neuroimaging research project on memory integration at the Vrije Universiteit and Universiteit van Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

In my Ph.D. work, I built computational simulations of human learning in video games to shed light on the cognitive mechanisms of skill learning. Because of my background in music cognition, I am particularly interested in the overlap between music performance and video game learning. In the last 2 years of my Ph.D., I started investigating the neural correlates of sensorimotor learning and motor timing skill acquisition. My strategy has been to combine electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to learn more about the neural underpinnings of skill learning. My work takes a systems neuroscience perspective on skill acquisition. I am interested in how cortical and sub-cortical structures interact with one another as skill builds up, and in how cortical regions and motor relay neurons regulate motor control over time.