Lucca is a PhD student in the Translational Psychiatry Lab. He is particularly interested in computational psychiatry, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind and psychiatry.
He earned dual B.Sc. degrees in Liberal Arts and Sciences from University College Freiburg (Germany) and University College Maastricht (Netherlands). Subsequently, Lucca earned an M.Sc. from Freie Universität Berlin (Germany) in Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience. Alongside his Master’s, Lucca worked as a research assistant at the Visual Perception Lab at Charité Universitätsmedizin (Germany), conducting behavioral, fMRI, eye-tracking, and EEG experiments with both healthy participants and patients with neurological as well as psychiatric conditions. In his master’s research he piloted a task battery devised to evaluate multiple markers of E/I ratio using EEG and behavioral tasks in patients with schizophrenia. In addition to his research, Lucca also served as the blog editor for MIND Foundation, collaborating with authors and interviewing leading scientists to make complex neuroscience topics accessible to the public.
Currently pursuing a PhD at UPK Basel, Lucca investigates the effects of LSD on visual perceptual decision-making. Combining behavioral experiments, EEG, eye-tracking, and computational modeling, his research aims to unravel the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying altered perception in psychedelic-induced and pathological states.