José Fernando Maya-Vetencourt – Network Science- Top Researcher Award

Published on by Network Science

José Fernando Maya-Vetencourt – Network Science- Top Researcher Award

Assoc Prof Dr. José Fernando Maya-Vetencourt distinguished academic and researcher in the field Network science.

🌐 Professional Profile

Educations📚📚📚

Dr. José Fernando Maya-Vetencourt obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Biology from the University of the Andes in Merida. He then pursued a Master’s degree in Biochemistry and Cellular Biology at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he contributed to an international research project. He earned his PhD in Neurobiology at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa under the mentorship of Lamberto Maffei and continued there as a Postdoctoral fellow. His postdoctoral work extended to the NEST laboratory.

Research Interests

Dr. Maya-Vetencourt’s research interests encompass:

  1. Neuronal Interfaces: Developing devices to substitute damaged tissues in the nervous system.
  2. Optogenetics and Neuronal Plasticity: Investigating mechanisms underlying sensory perception and behavior.
  3. Retinal Circuitries: Studying physiological and pathological conditions in the retina.

Publications and Academic Contributions

Dr. Maya-Vetencourt has published 34 scientific manuscripts in esteemed peer-reviewed journals, with 29 indexed in PubMed, including Science, Nature Neuroscience, and Nature Nanotechnology. He has edited one neuroscience book, authored four book chapters, and co-invented four patents. His work has garnered over 3400 citations, an H-index of 22 on Google Scholar, and an average impact factor per manuscript of 13.06.

Teaching and Mentorship

He has supervised over 35 Master’s thesis students in Neuroscience and Biotechnology. Dr. Maya-Vetencourt is a member of the Italian Society of Neuroscience (SINS), the American Society of Neuroscience (SfN), and the Italian Physiological Society (SIF). He serves as an associate review editor for “Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience” and “Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience”.

Awards and Recognitions

In 2017, Dr. Maya-Vetencourt received two prestigious “Young Investigator” awards: one from the Italian Physiological Society in Pavia and another from the Federation of European Physiological Societies in Vienna.

Pioneering Research

Dr. Maya-Vetencourt pioneered approaches to reactivate juvenile-like plasticity in the adult visual system (Nat Neurosc 2007; Science 2008). He explored chromatin susceptibility mechanisms for reinstating plasticity in the adult brain (Eur J Neurosci 2011). At IIT, he set up an electrophysiology lab to apply photovoltaic interfaces in rodent models of retinitis pigmentosa, leading to the development of a fully organic prosthetic device for subretinal implantation in RCS rats (Nat Mat 2017). This research demonstrated significant recovery of light sensitivity and visual acuity, accompanied by increased metabolic activity in the visual cortex.

Current Projects

Dr. Maya-Vetencourt is currently working on adapting surgical implant procedures for pig models to evaluate biocompatibility and visual function recovery (Front Bioeng Biotech 2020). He is also developing innovative “liquid” retinal prostheses to address age-related macular degeneration (Nat Nanotech 2020a, 2020b).

Future Directions

Dr. Maya-Vetencourt continues to advance the field of neuroscience by developing novel, biocompatible, and cost-effective solutions for neurodegenerative diseases, aiming to improve therapeutic outcomes for patients with degenerative blindness.

 

 

📝🔬Publications📝🔬

  • 1. Edoardo Porzano, Benedetta Borghi, José Fernando Maya-Vetencourt. 2024.
    Environmental enrichment as an innovative therapeutic approach to treat neurodegenerative
    blindness (in preparation)
    2. Edoardo Porzano, Dominga Lapi, Benedetta Borghi, Silvia Marracci, Melecchi Alberto,
    Giovanni Casini, José Fernando Maya-Vetencourt. 2024. Enriched environment
    enhances visual responses of the inner retina in early-stage retinitis pigmentosa (in
    preparation)
    3. Dmytro Shmal, Giulia Mantero, Thomas Floss, Fabio Benfenati, José Fernando MayaVetencourt. 2024. Restoring vision in adult amblyopia by enhancing plasticity through
    deletion of the transcriptional repressor REST. iScience 27(4): 109507. IF 5.8
    4. Ilaria Piano, Arianna Votta, Patrizia Colucci, Francesca Corsi, Sara Vitolo, Chiara Cerri, Dario
    Puppi, Michele Lai, José Fernando Maya-Vetencourt, Massimiliano Leigheb, Chiara
    Gabellini, Elisabetta Ferraro. 2023. Anti-inflammatory reprogramming of microglia cells by
    metabolic modulators to counteract neurodegeneration: a new role for Ranolazine. Scientific
    Reports 13: 20138. IF 5.13
    5. Simona Francia, Stefano Di Marco, Mattia Lorenzo DiFrancesco, Davide Ferrari, Dmytro
    Shmal, Alessio Cavalli, Grazia Pertile, Marcella Attanasio, José Fernando MayaVetencourt, Giovanni Manfredi, Guglielmo Lanzani, Fabio Benfenati, Elisabetta Colombo.
    2023. P3HT-Graphene device for the restoration of visual properties in a model of retinitis
    pigmentosa. Advanced Materials Technologies 8: 2201467. IF 8.86
    6. Domenico Ventrella*, José Fernando Maya-Vetencourt*, Alberto Elmi, Francesca Barone,
    Camilla Aniballi, Luisa Vera Muscatello, Maurizio Mete, Grazia Pertile, Fabio Benfenati, Maria
    Laura Bacci. 2022. The p-ERG spatial acuity in the biomedical pig under physiological
    conditions. Scientific Reports 12: 15479. IF 5.13
    7. Simona Francia, Dmytro Shmal, Stefano Di Marco, Greta Chiaravalli, José Fernando MayaVetencourt, Giulia Mantero, Caterina Michetti, Sara Cupini, Giovanni Manfredi, Mattia
    Lorenzo DiFrancesco, Anna Rocchi, Sara Perotto, Marcella Attanasio, Riccardo Sacco, Silvia
    Bisti, Maurizio Mete, Grazia Pertile, Guglielmo Lanzani, Elisabetta Colombo, Fabio Benfenati.
    2022. Light induced charge generation in polymeric nanoparticles restores vision in
    advanced-stage retinitis pigmentosa rats. Nature Communications 13: 3677. IF 17.69
    8. Miguel Skirzewski, Stéphane Molotchnikoff, Luis F Hernandez, José Fernando MayaVetencourt. 2022. Multisensory integration: is medial prefrontal cortex signaling relevant for
    the treatment of higher-order visual dysfunctions? Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience
    14: 806376. IF 5.63
    9. Stefano di Marco, Mattia Di Francesco, Elisabetta Colombo, Giovanni Manfredi, José
    Fernando Maya- Vetencourt, Guglielmo Lanzani, Fabio Benfenati. 2020. Modulation of
    neuronal firing: what role can nanotechnology play? Nanomedicine 8: 579141. IF 4.7
    10. José Fernando Maya-Vetencourt, Stefano Di Marco, Maurizio Mete, Mattia Di Paolo,
    Francesca Barone, Domenico Ventrella, Giovanni Manfredi, Silvia Bisti, Guglielmo Lanzani,
    Grazia Pertile, Maria Laura Bacci, Fabio Benfenati. 2020. Biocompatibility of a polymeric
    subretinal prosthesis in the domestic pig. Frontiers in Bioengineering and
    Biotechnology 8: 1188. IF 6.06
    11. José Fernando Maya-Vetencourt, Giovanni Manfredi, Maurizio Mete, Elisabetta Colombo,
    Mattia Bramini, Mattia DiFrancesco, Dmytro Shmal, Cyril Eleftheriou, Francesca Di Maria,
    Vanessa Cossu, Laura Emionite, Flavia Ticconi, Cecilia Marini, Gianmario Sambuceti, Grazia
    Pertile, Guglielmo Lanzani, Fabio Benfenati. 2020. Subretinal semiconducting polymer
    nanoparticles fully rescue vision in a rat model of retinal dystrophy. Nature
    Nanotechnology 15: 698. IF 40.5
    12. DiFrancesco Mattia, Elisabetta Colombo, Ermanno Papaleo, José Fernando MayaVetencourt, Giovanni Manfredi, Guglielmo Lanzani, Fabio Benfenati. 2020. A hybrid P3HTGraphene interface for efficient photostimulation of neurons. Carbon 162: 308. IF 11.3
    13. Francesca Barone, Luisa Vera Muscatello, Domenico Ventrella, Alberto Elmi, Noemi
    Romagnoli, Luciana Mandrioli, José Fernando Maya-Vetencourt, Cristiano Bombardi,
    Maurizio Mete, Giuseppe Sarli, Fabio Benfenati, Grazia Pertile, Maria Laura Bacci. 2020. The
    porcine iodoacetic acid model of retinal degeneration: morpho-functional characterization of
    the visual system. Experimental Eye Research 193 107979. IF 3.77
    14. Mattia DiFrancesco, Francesco Lodola, Elisabetta Colombo, Luca Maragliano, Giuseppe M.
    Paternò, Mattia Bramini, Simone Cimò, Letizia Collela, Daniele Fazzi, José Fernando MayaVetencourt, Chiara Bertarelli, Guglielmo Lanzani, Fabio Benfenati. 2020. Neuronal firing
    modulation by a membrane-targeted photoswitch. Nature Nanotechnology 15(4): 296. IF
    40.5
    15. Stéphane Molotchnikoff, Vishal Bharmauria, Nayan Chanauria, Lyes Bachatene, José
    Fernando Maya- Vetencourt. 2019. The function of connectomes in encoding sensory
    stimuli. Progress in Neurobiology 101659. IF 14.16
    16. Luisa Vera Muscatello, Francesca Barone, Domenico Ventrella, Alberto Elmi, Luciana
    Mandrioli, Noemi Romagnoli, José Fernando Maya-Vetencourt, Cristiano Bombardi,
    Maurizio Mete, Giuseppe Sarli, Fabio Benfenati, Grazia Pertile, Maria Laura Bacci. 2019.
    Retinal features in iodoacetic-treated biomedical pigs as a model for photoreceptor disorders.
    Journal of Comparative Pathology 166: 103. IF N.A.
    17. Francesca Barone, Eleonora Nannoni, Alberto Elmi, Domenico Ventrella, Marika Vitali,
    Giovanna Martelli, José Fernando Maya-Vetencourt, Fabio Benfenati, Maria Laura Bacci.
    2018. Behavioral assessment of vision in pigs. Journal of the American Association for
    Laboratory Animal Science 57(4): 350. IF 1.34

Liwei Deng- Autonomous Driving- Best Researcher Award

Published on by Network Science

Liwei Deng- Autonomous Driving-Best Researcher Award

Prof. Liwei Deng distinguished academic and researcher in the field Autonomous Driving. 

🌐 Professional Profile

Educations📚📚📚

He holds a Ph.D. in Control Science and Engineering from the Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, which he earned in 2014. His dissertation focused on “Control Theory and Its Applications of Fractional Order Sliding Mode” under the supervision of Professor Shenmin Song. Prior to this, he completed a Master of Science in Control Theory and Control Engineering at Harbin University of Science and Technology in 2010, where his thesis was titled “Pressure Data Acquisition and Control System Based on ARM,” supervised by Professor Junshan Gao. He began his academic journey with a Bachelor of Engineering in Automation from Jiamusi University, Jiamusi, China, graduating in 2007.

 Experience:

He began his academic career as a Lecturer in the School of Automation at Harbin University of Science and Technology, serving from October 2014 to August 2018. Following this, he was promoted to Associate Professor within the same school, a role he held from August 2018 to August 2023. In September 2023, he was further promoted to the position of Professor at the School of Automation. Additionally, since May 2023, he has been serving as a Doctoral Supervisor in the School of Computer Science and Technology at Harbin University of Science and Technology.

Projects 

He has been actively involved in various research projects over the years. From 2021 to 2024, he led the Key R&D Program Guidance Projects of Heilongjiang Province (Grant No. GZ20210065), focusing on the development of intelligent winding equipment for hydrogen cylinders based on robots. As the Principal Investigator for the National Science Foundation for Young Scientists of China (Grant No. 61806060) from 2019 to 2021, he researched diabetic retinal image analysis algorithms using fractional order differential and deep learning. During the same period, he also served as Principal Investigator for a project funded by the Natural Science Foundation of Heilongjiang Province, China, which focused on the key technology of defect detection of wind turbine blades based on images taken by unmanned aerial vehicles. From 2017 to 2020, he was the Principal Investigator for the Harbin Program of Science and Technology (Grant No. 2017RAQXJ006), which aimed to develop key technologies for the automatic production line for rubber bridge bearing members. Additionally, he played significant roles in several other projects, including being a Principal Participant in the National Natural Science Foundation of China project (Grant No. 61174037) on distributed motion autonomous coordination control of on-orbit multi-spacecraft expectation mode (2011-2015), a Participant in the State Key Program of National Natural Science of China (Grant No. 61333003) on coordination control technology for networked satellite clusters (2012-2016), and a Principal Participant in a project funded by the Natural Science Foundation of Heilongjiang Province, China (Grant No. F030101) on the dynamic morphology of hyperchaotic attractors (2013-2016).

📝🔬Publications📝🔬

    • Deng, L., Zou, Y., Yang, X. et al. L2NLF: a novel linear-to-nonlinear framework for multi-modal medical image registration[J]. Biomed. Eng. Lett.(2024).（WOS:001139763600001）
    • Deng, L., Lan, Q., Zhi, Q. et al. Deep learning-based 3D brain multimodal medical image registration[J]. Med Biol EngComput .2024,62: 505–（WOS:001098686900001）
    • Biao Zhang, Sheng Wang, Liwei Deng, et al.Ship motion attitude prediction model based on IWOA-TCN-Attention[J].Ocean Engineering,2023,272:113911
    • Liwei Deng, Henan Sun, Jing Wang, et al.A Novel Unsupervised MRI Synthetic CT Image Generation Framework with Registration Network[J].CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua,2023,77(2):2271–（WOS:0011269599000 24）
    • Liwei Deng, Zhen Liu,Jiandong Wang et al.ATT-YOLOv5-Ghost: Water surface object detection in complex scenes[J].Journal of Real-Time Image Processing,2023,20:97.（WOS:001050358900001）
    • LiweiDeng,ShanshanLiu,WeiShi,et al.Defect Detection and Classification of Offshore Wind Turbine Rotor Blades[J].Nondestructive Testing and Evaluation,2023.（WOS:001025791800001）
    • Yuheng Yin, Yangang Guo, Liwei Deng, et al.Improved Pspnet-Based Water Shoreline Detection in Complex Inland River Scenarios[J]. Complex & Intelligent Systems, 2022,9(1): 233-245.（WOS:000816995100001）
    • Liwei Deng, Yue Wang, Qi Lan,etal.Remote sensing image building change detection based on efficient-UNet++[J].Journal of Applied Remote Sensing,2023,17(3):034501.（WOS:00177860300006）
    • Liwei Deng, He Cao,QingboDong,etal.Semi-Supervised Lane Detection for Continuous Traffic Scenes[J].Traffic Injury Prevention.2023,24(6):452-457.（WOS:001008469300001）
    • Liwei Deng, Yanchao Zou, SijuanHuang,et al. Deformable 3D Medical Image Registration with ConvolutionalNeural Network and Transformer[J].Journal of Instrumentation.2023,(18):P04029（WOS:000986658100 001）
    • Rui Zhang, Cong Xie, Liwei Deng. A Fine-Grained Object Detection Model for Aerial Images Based on Yolov5 Deep Neural Network[J]. Chinese Journal of Electronics, 2023, 32(1): 51-63.（WOS:000932261100001）
    • Liwei Deng, Yufei Ji, Sijuan Huang, et al.Synthetic CT generation from CBCT using Double-Chain-CycleGAN[J].Computers in Biology and Medicine.2023,106889.（WOS:001006917800001）
    • Liwei Deng, JiandongWang, Zhen Liu. Cascaded Network Based on EfficientNet and Transformer for Deepfake Video Detection[J].Neural Processing Letters.2023.（WOS:000961765200002）
    • Liwei Deng, QiangZhi, Sijuan Huang, et al. A Deformable Patch-based Transformer for 3D Medical Image Registration[J].International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery.2023.（WOS:000990481800001）
    • Liwei Deng, Yuanzhi Zhang, Xin Yang, et al. Meta-learning Multi-scale Radiology Medical Image Superresolution[J].CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua.2023,75(2) :2671-2684.（WOS:000980836000018）
    • Liwei Deng, Yuanzhi Zhang, Jing Wang, et al. Improving Performance of Medical Image Alignment through Super-resolution[J].Biomedical Engineering Letters.2023.（WOS:000934806000001）
    • LiweiDeng ,Mingxing Zhang , JingWang, et al.Improving Cone-Beam Ct Quality Using a Cycle-Residual Connection with a Dilated Convolution-Consistent Generative Adversarial Network[J]. Physics in Medicine & Biology, 2022,67(14): 145010.（WOS:000822102200001）
    • Liwei Deng, Jie Hu, Jing Wang, et al.Synthetic CT Generation Based on CBCT Using Respath-cycleGAN[J]. Medical Physics, 2022,49(8): 5317-5329.（WOS:000792418600001）
    • Zhe Yan, Shuchun Chu, Liwei Deng. Visual SLAM Based on Instance Segmentation in Dynamic Scenes[J]. Measurement Science and Technology.2021,32(9):095113.（WOS:000662668300001）

    Conference Papers

    • Liwei Deng*, Yuanzhi Zhang, Xiaofei Wang. High-definition Processing of Remote Sensing Images Based on CUT-CycleGAN[C], The 40th Chinese Control Conference, CCC 2021.( EI：20214311045982).
    • Liwei Deng*, YueWang, Jing Han. Optical Disc Location Based on Similarity toImproved Harris Algorithm[C], The 40th Chinese Control Conference, CCC 2021.( EI：20214311046402).
    • Liwei Deng*, Hongfei Suo, Haonan Ren. Research on Tension Control System of Winding Machine Based on Fuzzy PID Algorithm[C], The 40th Chinese Control Conference, CCC 2021.( EI：20214311045650).
    • Yuheng Yin, Yangang Guo, Liwei Deng*. Research on Image Processing Application of Improved Adaptive Filter Based on LPSO Algorithm[C], The 40th Chinese Control Conference, CCC 2021.( EI：20214311045948).
    • Yanshu Jiang, Mingqi Jia, Biao Zhang, Liwei Deng. Malicious Domain Name Detection Model Based on CNN-GRU-Attention[C], The 33rd Chinese Control and Decision Conference, CCDC 2021.
    • Liwei Deng, Xiaofei Wang.A New Fracture Image Segmentation Method Based on MSA-k Clustering Algorithm[C], The 39th Chinese Control Conference, CCC 2020.( EI：20203909242340).
    • Liwei Deng,Jie Hu,Jingjing Qi. Super-Resolution Reconstruction of Finger Vein Image Based on Regression Tree Model[C],The 32nd Chinese Control and Decision Conference, CCDC 2020.( EI：20204009254996).