Fabrizio Lombardi studied physics at the University of Naples “Federico II” and received his PhD in physics from ETH Zürich. After the PhD, he was a postdoc at the Department of Physics of Boston University, where he investigated physical mechanisms underlying sleep regulations and the emergent complexity of sleep architecture. Since 2019 he works at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria as a postdoc, and studies collective brain dynamics and criticality in rats and humans. He was an IST postdoctoral fellow (MSCA-IST grant agreement) from 2019 to 2021, and was awarded a Lise Meitner fellowship from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) in 2021 to study the functional role of critical brain dynamics in learning and memory. In 2021 he was also awarded a STARS Starting grant from the University of Padua. His research interests fall into the realm of theoretical and computational statistical physics, with a particular inclination towards non-equilibrium dynamics and information processing in biological and physiological systems. With the project BRAINCIP, he will investigate the relationship between information processing and critical dynamics on brain-wide networks in vivo, and test for the first time the key assumptions of the critical brain hypothesis in performing brains.