DrGiorgio Gilestro

Giorgio Gilestro is Associate Professor in Systems Neurobiology. He obtained his PhD in Developmental Biology from the University of Vienna in 2006 and completed postdoctoral training in Sleep Biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2009.

Gilestro's scientific achievements include pioneering work in Drosophila sleep research, combining genetics, engineering, bioinformatics, AI, and biology to advance understanding of sleep function and evolution. Among these, the discovery that sleep and wakefulness are functionally associated with changes in synaptic strength in the Drosophila brain, published in Science in 2009 (this remains to date one of the most cited finding of the field); describe Drosophila as a model to study subconscious experience during sleep (Nature 2021); characterise the evolution of sleep function in Drosophilids (Nature Communications 2024).

Gilestro's laboratory is also known for the development of innovative tools for sleep analysis in Drosophila, including:

•  pySolo: An open-source software solution for sleep analysis (published in Bioinformatics 2009 and Nature Protocols 2012)
• Ethoscopes: An open-source platform using artificial intelligence for video tracking of flies and sleep identification (published in PLoS Biology 2017)
• Rethomics and ethoscopy: R- and Python-based platforms for analyzing sleep and circadian rhythms (published in PLoS One 2019 and Bioinformatics Advances 2023)
  
  Gilestro has raised over £2.5M in competitive national and international grant funding, including BBSRC, MarieCurie, EMBO, CZI. He has mentored eight PhD students and three postdocs, with four of his mentees establishing their own independent research groups in academia. His contributions to the field have earned him invitations to speak at numerous international conferences and seminars, including three keynote addresses and a TEDx talk in 2017.