Maria Puxeddu
- Ph.D. in Bioengineering, University of Rome La Sapienza
Dr. Puxeddu joined the School of Neuroscience in the fall of 2025. Her research in network neuroscience explores how the brain’s network architecture gives rise to cognition and behavior, and how its disruption leads to psychological or neural disorders. Through a vast web of neural connections—the connectome—distant brain regions exchange information and dynamically coordinate their activity. Her work integrates neuroimaging, network science, and statistics to uncover the organizing principles of the connectome’s complex wiring that enable the emergence of cognition and behavior through coordinated brain dynamics.
Before joining Virginia Tech as a faculty member, she earned her Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Rome La Sapienza, and completed her postdoctoral training at Indiana University Bloomington in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
Over the past two decades, network neuroscience has reshaped our understanding of brain function, moving from reductionist perspectives to systems-level approaches. Cognition, behavior, and mental disorders are now viewed as emerging properties of complex interactions across neural systems. My lab studies the brain as a network of interconnected elements, where nodes represent neural components—ranging from single neurons to large-scale regions—and edges reflect their structural or functional relationships. By combining neuroimaging, computational modeling, and network science, we aim to uncover the organizing principles that shape brain architecture and dynamics.
Key questions that we seek to answer include:
- What are the fundamental organizational principles of brain networks?
- How does the brain’s anatomical architecture shape its functional repertoire?
- How do brain networks reorganize across time—from seconds to years—to support cognition, development, and aging?
- How are network principles conserved across species and spatial scales?
Our research advances methods to study brain network modularity, structure–function coupling, and time-varying network organization, integrating data from humans and model organisms. Ultimately, we seek to reveal how the brain’s intricate wiring gives rise to flexible and adaptive behavior across individuals and lifespans.
See Dr. Puxeddu’s Google Scholar here.