Maria Giulia Preti is a Senior Scientist and Lab Manager at the Medical Image Processing Lab (MIPLab), Neuro-X Institute, EPFL, and is affiliated as well to the Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva. 

She received her Ph.D. in Bioengineering at Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy) in 2013, after her M. Sc. (2009) and B. Sc. (2007) in Biomedical Engineering, as well at Politecnico di Milano. During her Ph.D., she focused on advanced techniques of brain magnetic resonance imaging, in particular she developed a method of groupwise fMRI-guided tractography, that revealed useful in the in-vivo investigation of the pathophysiological changes across the evolution of Alzheimer's disease. In 2011, she was awarded a Progetto Rocca fellowship from MIT-Italy and spent a visiting research period at the MIT and Harvard Medical School (Boston, USA), under the supervision of Prof. Nikos Makris, where she could focus on the anatomical study of specific neruonal bundles. She joined Dimitri Van De Ville's group at EPFL and the CIBM Center for Biomedical Imaging  in 2013 as a post-doc. She became lecturer (Maître-Assistante) at the University of Geneva in 2018.

Her current research aims at investigating the relationship between brain function and structure by using advanced techniques of magnetic resonance imaging and graph signal processing methods. In particular, she is working on functional MRI, functional connectivity, diffusion tensor imaging and tractography, integration of MRI with other techniques (e.g. EEG), and the application of these methods to several clinical contexts, e.g., epilepsy, Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment, multiple sclerosis, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, stroke.

Dr. Preti is an active lecturer at both EPFL and UNIGE, where she supervises several student projects each semester. She is a Senior Member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) and a member of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM). She also serves on the Bio Imaging and Signal Processing Technical Committee (BISP TC).

Thanks to her internationally recognized research, she is regularly invited to speak at major international conferences and meetings in the fields of neuroscience and neuroimaging. She is the author of more than 60 peer-reviewed scientific articles published in top-tier journals.

The course, currently scheduled for the spring semester, covers a complete overview of modern Network Neuroscience, focusing on concepts of graph (spectral) theory applied to the brain. Based on data from noninvasive neuroimaging techniques of magnetic resonance imaging (such as fMRI, DTI), the course teaches how to extract meaningful brain networks and to analyze them, in the context of clinical and behavioral studies.
Keywords: brain structure, brain function, fMRI, DTI, connectivity, graph theory, graph spectral theory, graph signal processing, resting-state networks, multimodal, mutivariate analysis.