Dr Andrea Luppi, a Research Fellow at St John’s College, is among 25 researchers worldwide to be recognised by The Transmitter – a US-based publication for the neuroscience community.
Rising Stars in Neuroscience 2025 honours early-career researchers who have made outstanding scientific contributions to the field and demonstrated a commitment to mentoring and community-building. The winners are tipped to shape the neuroscience community for years to come.
“This award means a lot to me because it recognises not only scientific contributions, but also another facet that I care deeply about: science mentorship and commitment to community-building in neuroscience,” said Dr Luppi, a Wellcome Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and University of Oxford.
“I am incredibly grateful to the mentors who helped me to get here, and I will strive to deliver on this promise.”
The winning researchers are from multiple areas of the field – including computational, molecular and cognitive neuroscience – who strive to answer some of its most pressing questions.
Dr Luppi’s work investigates how brain function arises from the complex interplay of brain structure and dynamics. He studies how different drugs and conditions, such as anaesthesia or a comatose state, affect brain dynamics across species.
His work in translational and computational neuroscience is already having an impact. Dr Luppi and colleagues ‘pioneered the comparison of brain dynamics from anesthetised volunteers and comatose patients to identify neural signatures of consciousness, an approach that is now widespread in the field’, said Bratislav Misic, Professor at the Montreal Neurological Institute, who has worked with him. The study was published in Nature Communications in 2019.
In his outreach work, Dr Luppi has written about the challenges faced by early-career researchers in NeuroAI and served as a mentor for Project Access Italy. The non-profit startup aims to improve access to educational institutions for students from underrepresented backgrounds in his home country of Italy.
For his doctoral work in Cambridge, Dr Luppi was awarded the2024 Universal Scientific Education and Research Network Prize in Formal Sciences – a global prize for young scientists – and the Italy Made Me 2024 Award for Life Sciences by the Italian Embassy Scientific Office in London.
The Rising Stars of Neuroscience were revealed on Saturday 15 November at Neuroscience 2025 – the annual Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego.
More than 100 scientists around the world were nominated by a peer or mentor for the title and The Transmitter’s senior editorial staff selected the finalists.
