Biography
In the same year he was born, he was expelled from the Soviet Union with his parents and other members of the Rizzolatti family, as a foreigner. A law introduced during the Fascist era requires that repatriation take place in Friuli, in Clauzetto, as the town of origin of Giacomo's great-grandfather, who emigrated to Kiev in the late 19th century. [6] He then graduated from the Liceo Classico Jacopo Stellini high school in Udine and in 1961 he graduated in Medicine and surgery from the University of Padua, where he also obtained a specialization in Neurology in 1964.
After three years at the Institute of Physiology at the University of Pisa, directed by Giuseppe Moruzzi (and of whom he was a student), in 1967 he became assistant professor and later full professor of Human Physiology at the University of Parma; since 2002, he has been director of the Academic department of Neuroscience at the same university. Since 2012, he has been teaching Neurophysiological Foundations of Cognitive Functions at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan.
He spent periods studying and conducting research at the Department of Psychology at McMaster University and, as a visiting professor, at the Department of Anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania.
From 1985 to 1986, he was president of the European Brain Behavior Society. [7]
He is the coordinator of the group of scientists who, in 1992, in the field of Evolutionary psychology, discovered the existence of Mirror neuron, motor cells in the brain that are activated both during the execution of purposeful movements and when observing similar movements performed by other individuals, a discovery that, among other things, identified the first physiological basis of empathy. In 1995, they discovered motor resonance in humans.
One of the world's leading neuroscientists, he is a member of the Academia Europaea, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, [8] the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the French Academy of Sciences of the Institut de France. He is an honorary member of the Italian Society for Neuroscience, of which he was president. [9] He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2021. [10]
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