Valeria Gazzola (born 19 January 1977)[1] is an Italian neuroscientist, associate professor at the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and member of the Young Academy of Europe.
[2][3] She is also a tenured department head at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN) in Amsterdam, where she leads her own research group and the Social Brain Lab together with neuroscientist Christian Keysers.
Her experimental thesis in the Rizzolatti Laboratory under the supervision of Vittorio Gallese entitled “The role of the somatosensory cortices during the observation of the tactile stimulation of others” contributed to a publication in Neuron.
[17][18][10] In her current work, financed by a European Research Council (ERC) grant, Gazzola investigates the question of whether and how, the insula and cingulate contribute to our decisions to help others if doing so is costly.
For this project, she co-founded the Centre for Ultrasound Brain imaging (CUBE) together with groups from the Erasmus Medical Center and Delft University of Technology funded by the Dutch Research Council.