Brain mechanisms
I study neural oscillations (Rapela et al., 2018), traveling waves (Rapela 2016, 2017), as well as population codes (Rapela et al., 2015).

Cognition, perception and action
I investigate neural mechanisms related to attention and temporal expectation (Rapela et al., 2018), to visual perception (Rapela et al., 2006, 2010), and to speech (Rapela 2016, 2017).

Brain malfunction
I am currently investigating low-dimensional representations of high-dimensional electrophysiological recordings from patients suffering from epilespy. Preliminary evidence shows that low-dimensional representations yield superior seizure forecasting performance than the original high-dimensional ones (Rapela and Truccolo, in preparation).

Neural recordings
I have characterized electrophysiological recordings from single neurons of cats (Rapela et al 2006, 2010), non-invasive electrophysiological recordings from the human scalp (EEG, Rapela et al, 2018), and invasive electrophysiological recordings from the human cortex (ECoG, Rapela 2016, 2017; high-density MEA, Rapela and Truccolo, in preparation).

Advanced mathematical methods
My publications demonstrate research experience on function approximation and nonlinear function optimization (Rapela et al., 2006, 2010), variational Bayes linear regression (Rapela et al., 2018), nonlinear dynamical systems and statistical mechanics (Rapela et al., 2015), dimensionality reduction and hidden Markov models (Rapela et al., in preparation).