Dr Valeria Della-Maggiore Awarded ALBA-Elsevier Award Lecture on Brain Sciences 2025
"I am deeply honoured to receive this award and sincerely thank the ALBA Network and Elsevier for this recognition. This prize is a significant milestone for my lab and for cognitive neuroscience in Argentina and Latin America, where the field is still emerging and often underrepresented globally. It also comes at a critical time when research in Argentina faces severe challenges due to the suspension of funding by the current government, leading to the interruption of vital projects and an avoidable exodus of talented researchers abroad. I hope this recognition draws attention to the importance of supporting science in our region and underscores the resilience of our scientific community in overcoming these obstacles to continue advancing knowledge and fostering scientific excellence both locally and globally." - Dr Valeria Della-Maggiore
Brussels, 16 December 2024 – Valeria Della-Maggiore, Associate Professor at the School of Science and Technology at the University of San Martín (UNSAM) and Principal Investigator at the Institute of Physical Sciences (ICIFI UNSAM-CONICET) and the Institute of Physiology and Biophysics (IFIBIO Houssay), School of Medicine, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, has been awarded the prestigious ALBA-Elsevier Award Lecture on Brain Sciences 2025. This recognition is in acknowledgement of her significant work on the active role of sleep in consolidating non-declarative motor memories.
Dr Della-Maggiore leads a research group that uses diverse motor paradigms that tackle key aspects of motor skill acquisition and skill maintenance, together with non-invasive techniques such as MRI and EEG to study the functional and structural mechanisms supporting memory encoding and consolidation during wakefulness and sleep. Her recent work, published in the Journal of Neuroscience (Solano et al., 2024) resolves a controversy regarding the role of sleep in consolidating motor memories. Sleep is known to enhance the retention of autobiographical memories, such as a pleasant memory of riding a bike with a friend. However, its role in retaining unconscious memories, like the act of riding a bike itself, is disputed. Using a cohort of nearly 300 participants, Solano et al. investigated how sleep contributes to an aspect of motor skill learning called sensorimotor adaptation – the ability to perform motor skills under changing environmental and internal conditions – and found that sleep shortly after motor training enhanced long-term memory retention by 30%. This improvement was linked to specific neural markers of long-term memory formation associated with sleep, typically linked to autobiographical memory enhancement. These findings support the existence of common mechanisms across memory domains, and could inform rehabilitation strategies to improve motor recovery by aligning training sessions with sleep.
After a PhD in Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Toronto, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University (where she continues to be Adjunct Professor), she returned from Canada to Argentina where she is currently a Principal Investigator of CONICET (National Research Council).
Dr Della-Maggiore earned her PhD in Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Toronto and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University’s Montreal Neurological Institute, where she continues as an Adjunct Professor. Upon returning to Argentina, she established an independent research program, overcoming significant economic and infrastructural challenges. She played a pivotal role in establishing Argentina’s first MRI facility for research in cognitive neuroscience (Unidad de Resonancia 3 T de la UBA) and currently serves as its Scientific Director. This facility has become a key regional hub for advancing research in the field.
In addition to her scientific achievements, Dr Della-Maggiore has demonstrated a strong commitment to advancing equity, diversity and inclusion in science through her leadership roles and outreach efforts. As a handling editor for the Organization for Human Brain Mapping’s Aperture Neuro and an advisory board member for iScience, she actively promotes diverse voices in publishing and ensures fair review processes. She has spearheaded initiatives to address gender and geographic inequalities, organising programs to encourage women in science and supporting researchers from underdeveloped regions through her work with the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO) and as chair of the Latin American Brain Mapping Network (LABMAN). Her outreach extends beyond academia, with public engagement activities and media appearances designed to make neuroscience accessible to diverse audiences, inspiring the next generation of scientists.
Dr Della-Maggiore will give a Special Lecture at the FENS Forum 2026, taking place in Barcelona from 4-8 July 2026.
For additional information about the prize, please visit: https://www.alba.network/alba-elsevier-award
