Valentina Pacella is an assistant professor (M-PSI/02 – Psychobiology and Physiological Psychology) at the University School for Advanced Studies IUSS-Pavia. She graduated in Cognitive Neuroscience and Clinical Neuropsychology at the University of Padua. In 2020, she completed a PhD in Cognitive Social and Affective Neuroscience at the Sapienza University of Rome in collaboration with the University of Verona. In 2017, she spent a period as visiting researcher at the Istitut du Cerveau (ICM) of the Hospital la Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris. In 2020, she worked as a post-doc in the Neuropsychology Lab (NpsyLab) at the University of Verona. From 2021 to 2022, she was a post-doc in the Neurofunctional Imaging Group (Group de Imagerie Neurofonctionelle, GIN) at the IMN in Bordeaux. She is now a faculty member of the IUSS Cognitive Neuroscience Centre (ICON) at IUSS-Pavia. Since 2017, she has been a member of the international group Brain Connectivity and Behaviour (BCBLab), a research network including the IMN in Bordeaux, the Donders Institute in Nijmegen, and Stanford University. Her research mainly focuses on exploring the latent brain-cognition organisation and identifying new, undetermined cognitive functions in the healthy and damaged brain. The research leverages an interdisciplinary approach that involves experimental neuropsychology, neuroimaging and computational sciences.