 My research agenda at the moment focused on understanding how during brain development molecular programmes, genetic programmes, act in the interplay with spontaneous activity. How these two paradigms can influence each other in defining the diversity of the neurons that we find in the cerebral cortex and the assembly of the circuits that compute all the complex behaviour that we humans can perform. This type of research will allow us to understand how the brain comes about and especially to unveil the role of spontaneous activity in the early phases of brain development and cortical development. This will be not only important for a basic standpoint to understand the grammar to which the brain is established but also to prevent and potentially treat some disorders like early infantile epilepsy. The type of technologies that are involved in carrying out this project span from single cellomics to decoded high-resolution diversity of the neurons and the molecular factors that translate this diversity into different functions of the neurons, coupled to calcium imaging and circuit analysis on MEA to understand how at the functional level this diversity is encoded into the nascent circuits. I think nowadays European research faces bigger challenges in trying to focus its agenda on health in general, personalized medicine, rare disorders and especially finding a framework to integrate all the big data that has been now incorporated in many different fields of science and try to leverage of this knowledge to produce faster and new degree of understanding how our body works and our brain in particular for me but also how disease come about and how they can be tackled.