luca fusar bassini

i study how the brain assembles itself during development, using computational tools to make sense of the molecular datasets that modern biology produces. i work in the la manno lab at epfl, where we build atlases that map gene expression and lipid metabolism across space and time in the developing vertebrate brain.

i grew up in italy and studied biology at the university of pisa, then completed a master's in molecular biotechnology (110/110 cum laude) while attending the scuola normale superiore, where i ranked first nationally in biology. before the phd i did my thesis in the yu lab at boston children's hospital and harvard medical school, studying splicing and antisense oligonucleotides for rare diseases. in a previous life i represented italy at the international biology olympiad.

my research sits at the intersection of spatial omics, single-cell multi-omics, and computational neuroscience. i am drawn to problems where new measurement technologies produce data faster than existing methods can interpret it — building the algorithms and frameworks to close that gap is what gets me out of bed. recently we published a computational algorithm in nature neuroscience for building cross-species neurodevelopmental atlases, and we have a spatially-resolved lipidomic atlas of the developing brain in advanced revision at nature. both come with an interactive atlas you can explore. more broadly, i care about understanding neurodevelopmental disorders through dynamic modeling and the convergence of biology and ai, with the dream to build technologies that measure biology at an unprecedented scale.

along the way i received a boehringer ingelheim fonds phd fellowship, an ermenegildo zegna founder's scholarship, and a $150k grant from the tido foundation. i was named among nova's top-10 under-25 in healthcare.

outside the lab i like to build things. i created ricet, a research automation agent built on claude, and paperboat, an ai-powered scientific newsletter. i write about ai and biotech for wired italia. i am a venture partner for ewor. i organized the single-cell and spatial metabolomics online day — a virtual event that brought together 900+ participants from 60+ countries across two editions. i founded tedxnormalepisa and once helped build piazza dei cavalieri out of 50,000 lego bricks.

i help organize lauzhack, mentor students through lead the future, and make podcasts — quel vaso di pandora ran for 30+ episodes on science and curiosity, the biotech futurist featured outstanding scientists, and risveglio a mumbai was recorded during my time as a volunteer in a shelter for street children in mumbai.