Francesco Randi

Science and other stuff

Curriculum vitae  |  Google scholar  |  GitHub  |  PhD Thesis

I am a physicist working in neuroscience and biophysics, and I have a PhD in condensed matter physics.

Skills/keyworks

  • optics: continuous-wave and pulsed lasers, building nonlinear optical devices, building custom microscopes
  • neuroscience: optogenetics, calcium imaging, whole-brain functional connectivity mapping (experiments and theory)
  • molecular biology: cloning, plasmids, transgenics
  • physics: condensed matter physics, nonequilibrium dynamics in strongly correlated materials (experiments and theory), quantum optics, computational studies and numerics
  • programming: Python, C/C++, LabView, Matlab

In my postdoc at Princeton, I measured whole-brain functional connectivity in the nematode C. elegans, and as a '22 Grass Fellow at MBL I am studying the nervous system of the rotifer B. manjavacas. To study how signals are processed in the brain, I use femtosecond lasers, custom microscopes that I build, transgenics, as well as theoretical and computational methods. To interpret the experimental data I collected in my postdoc, I developed a theoretical framework based on nonequilibrium Green's functions, adapting to neuroscience mathematical tools used in condensed matter physics. 

Before neuroscience, I worked on strongly correlated materials and ultrafast phase transitions. I studied the nonequilibrium Verwey transition in magnetite and nonequilibrium dynamics in cuprate superconductors, I showed with experiments and theory how to study the thermalization dynamics in coherent vibrations in solids, via the integration of pump-probe experiments and quantum optics methods. I also proposed an experimental scheme to bypass the time-energy uncertainty in time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy.