Tomás D'Amelio

PhD candidate

Neuroscience + Mathematics

Supervised by Enzo Tagliazucchi
and Diego Vidaurre

I decode affect from brain and physiological signals, and build the data and benchmarks that test whether those models hold up.

Most of my effort goes into that second half: whether we are measuring the emotions we set out to measure, and whether the ground truth we choose can carry the complexity of an affective state.

The clearest case is time. Emotion moves, but most data records a single rating collected after the fact, which throws away exactly the part I care about: how affective states rise, shift and decay. I model those dynamics, and I perturb them with immersive VR or psychedelic drugs to test what our measures are really following.

That mix of psychology and modelling is where I trained: a BSc in Psychology and an MSc in Data Science at the University of Buenos Aires, and an MSc in Cognitive Science at the École Normale Supérieure (Cogmaster, Paris), followed by research stays at INRIA (Paris, France), Telefónica (Spain) and Aarhus University (Denmark).

I teach as well, as Professor of Biology (Neuroscience) at the University of Buenos Aires and Professor of Data Analysis in the MSc in Behavioural Science at Universidad de San Andrés.

I also co-founded Neurotransmitiendo, one of the largest neuroscience education communities in the Spanish-speaking world, and NeuroTechX Buenos Aires, the local chapter of the world’s largest neurotechnology community.

news

Jun 22, 2026	Taking part in the Gatsby Bridging Programme, a seven-week intensive summer school in mathematics for theoretical neuroscience and machine learning, run by UCL’s Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit.
Apr 30, 2026	New preprint, as first author: Multimodal autonomic arousal tracks dose-dependent affective dynamics during the acute effects of DMT. Available on bioRxiv.
Apr 22, 2026	New preprint: Decoding the phenomenology of spontaneous thought using large language-model ratings on verbal retrospective free reports. Available on bioRxiv.
Feb 27, 2026	Visiting researcher with the Neuroscience group at Telefónica Innovación Digital, working on simultaneous EEG, fNIRS and peripheral physiology during virtual rollercoasters and immersive VR video.
Jan 15, 2026	Time-resolved neural and experience dynamics of medium- and high-dose N,N-Dimethyltryptamine is out in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

selected publications

bioRxiv

Multimodal Autonomic Arousal Tracks Dose-Dependent Affective Dynamics during the Acute Effects of DMT

Tomás Ariel D’Amelio, Tomás Gil Garbagnoli, Jerónimo Rodríguez Cuello, and 10 more authors

bioRxiv, May 2026

Bib HTML

@article{damelio2026autonomic,
  title = {Multimodal Autonomic Arousal Tracks Dose-Dependent Affective Dynamics during the Acute Effects of DMT},
  author = {D'Amelio, Tom{\'a}s Ariel and Gil Garbagnoli, Tom{\'a}s and Rodr{\'i}guez Cuello, Jer{\'o}nimo and Lewis-Healey, Evan and Pallavicini, Carla and Cavanna, Federico and Bruno, Nicol{\'a}s Marcelo and De La Fuente, Laura Alethia and M{\"u}ller, Stephanie and Copa, D{\'e}bora and Bekinschtein, Tristan and Vidaurre, Diego and Tagliazucchi, Enzo},
  journal = {bioRxiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = may,
}

bioRxiv

Decoding the Phenomenology of Spontaneous Thought using Large Language-Model Ratings on Verbal Retrospective Free Reports

Nicolás Bruno, Federico Cavanna, Federico Zamberlan, and 8 more authors

bioRxiv, Apr 2026

Bib HTML

@article{bruno2026spontaneous,
  title = {Decoding the Phenomenology of Spontaneous Thought using Large Language-Model Ratings on Verbal Retrospective Free Reports},
  author = {Bruno, Nicol{\'a}s and Cavanna, Federico and Zamberlan, Federico and D'Amelio, Tom{\'a}s and Muller, Stephanie and de la Fuente, Laura Alethia and Sitt, Jacobo and Valero-Cabr{\'e}, Antoni and Villarreal, Mirta and Tagliazucchi, Enzo and Pallavicini, Carla},
  journal = {bioRxiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = apr,
}

Neurocomputing

Emotion Recognition Systems with Electrodermal Activity: From Affective Science to Affective Computing

Tomás Ariel D’Amelio, Lorenzo Ariel Galán, Emmanuel Alesandro Maldonado, and 5 more authors

Neurocomputing, 2025

Bib HTML Code

@article{damelio2025emotion,
  title = {Emotion Recognition Systems with Electrodermal Activity: From Affective Science to Affective Computing},
  author = {D'Amelio, Tom{\'a}s Ariel and Gal{\'a}n, Lorenzo Ariel and Maldonado, Emmanuel Alesandro and D{\'i}az Barquinero, Agust{\'i}n Ariel and Rodr{\'i}guez Cuello, Jer{\'o}nimo and Bruno, Nicol{\'a}s Marcelo and Tagliazucchi, Enzo and Engemann, Denis-Alexander},
  journal = {Neurocomputing},
  volume = {651},
  pages = {130831},
  year = {2025},
}

R. Soc. Open Sci.

Big Team Science Reveals Promises and Limitations of Machine Learning Efforts to Model Physiological Markers of Affective Experience

Nicholas A. Coles, Bartosz Perz, Maciej Behnke, and 14 more authors

Royal Society Open Science, 2025

Bib HTML

@article{coles2025bigteam,
  title = {Big Team Science Reveals Promises and Limitations of Machine Learning Efforts to Model Physiological Markers of Affective Experience},
  author = {Coles, Nicholas A. and Perz, Bartosz and Behnke, Maciej and Eichstaedt, Johannes C. and Kim, Soo Hyung and Vu, Tu N. and Raman, Chirag and Tejada, Julian and Huynh, Van-Thong and Zhang, Guangyi and Tagliazucchi, Enzo and Bugnon, Leandro A. and Bruno, Nicolas M. and D'Amelio, Tomas A. and Zamberlan, Federico and Saganowski, Stanis{\l}aw and others},
  journal = {Royal Society Open Science},
  volume = {12},
  number = {6},
  pages = {241778},
  year = {2025},
}

ACIIW

Affective Computing as a Tool for Understanding Emotion Dynamics from Physiology: A Predictive Modeling Study of Arousal and Valence

Tomás A. D’Amelio, Nicolás M. Bruno, Leandro A. Bugnon, and 2 more authors

In 2023 11th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Workshops and Demos (ACIIW), 2023

DOI Bib HTML PDF Code

@inproceedings{damelio2023affective,
  title = {Affective Computing as a Tool for Understanding Emotion Dynamics from Physiology: A Predictive Modeling Study of Arousal and Valence},
  author = {D'Amelio, Tom{\'a}s A. and Bruno, Nicol{\'a}s M. and Bugnon, Leandro A. and Zamberlan, Federico and Tagliazucchi, Enzo},
  booktitle = {2023 11th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Workshops and Demos (ACIIW)},
  pages = {1--7},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.1109/ACIIW59127.2023.10388155},
}