Francesco Achilli

Francesco Achilli earned his Medical Degree from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Rome. After moving to Milan, he is now a psychiatry resident at the University of Milan. From his earliest experiences with mental health services during medical school, he developed a strong interest in precision psychiatry, with a particular focus on the determinants of mental disorders, from genetics to social factors. He identifies computational approaches and neuroAI as promising tools for integrating the multiple layers of complexity within psychiatric phenomena. His work is characterized by a theory-driven approach, aimed at building models grounded in theoretical foundations and biological plausibility. Aware of the interdisciplinary nature of this field, he has attended international programs such as the Computational Psychiatry Course at ETH Zurich and Culture, Mind, and Brain at McGill University’s Division of Transcultural Psychiatry. He spent six months in Montréal, Canada, collaborating with Professor Guillaume Dumas at the Precision Psychiatry and Social Physiology Lab (PPSP). There, together with Professors Dumas and Jean-Pierre Changeux, he implemented a biologically inspired Spiking Neural Network, investigating the paradoxical effect of zolpidem in disorders of consciousness. He is committed to integrating technical expertise in artificial intelligence, particularly neural networks, with clinical psychiatric knowledge, to foster a future increasingly oriented toward personalized therapies.