47.4979°N 19.0402°E · Budapest 46.5197°N 6.6323°E · Lausanne 59.3293°N 18.0686°E · Stockholm

Bruno Siniciali

Life sciences engineer at EPFL, training toward neurosurgery and neurotechnology.

Neurotech × Medicine

The logo

Why there is a bear.

The animal is Bruno the bear. My name is Bruno, and a bear is what you get when you say it out loud often enough. It walks rather than runs, which is roughly the pace I work at.

The brain in its head is the honest part. I know the organ I want to spend my life on. I do not know yet whether that means studying it, building for it, or opening it.

Most people are expected to have picked by now. I would rather stay accurate than sound decided, so the logo says both things at once: the direction is settled, the road is not.

  • Neuroscience Understand the mechanism. Why the brain does what it does.
  • Neurotechnology Build the interface. Turn the mechanism into a device.
  • Neurosurgery Operate. Work on the organ directly, with your hands.

Possibly more than one of them

About

How I got here.

I meant to become an anthropologist. Human imagination and intelligence fascinated me, so I went looking for them in politics, then in psychology, and ran into the same dissatisfaction each time. Those fields study human relationships well. But personality is contingent and culture-dependent, and I wanted something underneath it: a general model of how the brain works. That is what pointed me at neuroscience.

Medicine arrived from the other direction. During a hematology internship at Semmelweis University Hospital in Budapest, I got my first real look at a clinic from the inside. I left convinced there was still a lot to unlock in how diseases are detected, and in how the brain could be interfaced with technology. That is why I chose life sciences engineering over medical school. I wanted to understand both worlds deeply enough to connect them.

The question I keep coming back to is what shapes the way humans think, decide and change. It has taken me from EPFL's Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, to neurotech at Roceso Technologies in Singapore, and on to a medical engineering exchange at KTH Stockholm and the Karolinska Institute.

Memory is not an abstract interest here. Several people in my family live with dementia, each of them differently, and work on stimulation, agency and spatial memory is the closest thing I have found to a way in.

Research

Things I have built.

Sense of Agency and Episodic Memory

Laidlaw research internship at EPFL's Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience. I built the online experiment testing whether the sense of agency, the feeling of controlling your own actions, strengthens episodic memory, and added confidence ratings to the recognition protocol.

Research report

Neurorehabilitation Robotics

R&D and clinical operations internship at Roceso Technologies, Singapore. Developing rehabilitation concepts for a hand-tracking device paired with a soft-robotic glove, grounded in agency and memory neuroscience, to help stroke patients recover.

Computer Vision on Psychiatric Art

Led the deconfounding pipeline in a 48-hour clinical AI pilot applying DINOv2 visual embeddings to 3,054 psychiatric patient artworks from Bern University Hospital. Text inscription explained roughly 10 times more visual variance than colour or figure content, and three expressive clusters mapped onto diagnoses.

EPFL Sustainable Innovation Challenge

Challenge Team Leader for Europe's first student-led sustainability forum of its kind. Over 11 months I led the challenge design and the selection of 8 finalist teams from 4 countries, plus a 7-member jury, closing with an international final at EPFL.

Read the recap

Hopfield Networks and Learning Rules

An empirical study of Hopfield networks as associative memory, comparing Hebbian and Storkey learning rules, storage capacity and robustness to noise. Awarded top recognition in EPFL's BIO-210 programming competition, a team of three among roughly 180 participants.

Population Simulation in C++

A dynamic ecosystem simulation in C++ with SFML. Animals and plants in a 2D toroidal world with reproduction, predation, gestation and perception, built with polymorphism, inheritance and design patterns.

View on GitHub
“What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?” Ludwig Wittgenstein, epigraph of my LNCO research report
Education

Where I studied.

2024 — 2027

BSc Life Sciences Engineering

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Coursework spanning cell and molecular biology, biochemistry, signal processing, numerical analysis, machine learning and biostatistics. Running average 5.3/6 (as of Sept 2026).

2026 — 2027

Exchange, KTH and Karolinska Institute

Full-year exchange in Stockholm focused on medical engineering, machine learning for health, neuroscience and biomedical signal processing.

2025 — 2026

Oxford Character Project

Ethical leadership programme delivered by the University of Oxford as part of the Laidlaw Scholarship, developing ethical, self-aware and values-driven leadership through reflective practice.

2018 — 2024

Baccalauréat, Lycée Gustave Eiffel, Budapest

Valedictorian with highest honours, 19.24/20, mention très bien avec les félicitations du jury. Student council representative and eco-delegate, plus two years of MATh.en.JEANS research.

Experience

Where I have worked.

Jul 2026 — present · Singapore

R&D and Clinical Operations Intern

Roceso Technologies, Laidlaw Leadership-in-Action

Six-week Leadership-in-Action internship in neurorehabilitation robotics, translating cognitive neuroscience findings into rehabilitation tools for soft-robotic hand-therapy devices.

Apr 2025 — present · Lausanne

Challenge Team Leader

EPFL Sustainable Innovation Challenge

Eleven months designing the challenge and running selection for Europe's first student-led sustainability forum of its kind. Narrowed the applications to 8 finalist teams from 4 countries, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands and Switzerland, and recruited a 7-member jury from EPFL, UNIL, Alpiq, OIKEN, Resilio and E4S. Two days of pitches and workshops at EPFL, closing with a top three.

Read the recap
Jul — Sep 2025 · Geneva

Research Intern, Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience

LNCO, Neuro-X Institute, EPFL, Laidlaw Scholar

Eight weeks full-time on the EPFL Biotech Campus, on the link between sense of agency and episodic memory. Designed, programmed and deployed the online experiment in TypeScript: a 120-image encoding session run in 10 blocks of 12, a 180-image recognition session with 60 new items, and four retention groups at 1, 3, 5 and 24 hours, sized for a 200-participant sample. Added the per-trial confidence ratings the previous protocol did not have.

Research report
Feb — Jul 2026 · Lausanne

Teaching Assistant, Bio-organic Chemistry

EPFL, BIO-110

Three hours a week of exercise sessions for Prof. Bruno Correia's BIO-110. Wrote 2 exercise sheets, gave 2 revision lectures, and designed the semester's closing lecture on amino-acid structure, sequencing and chain synthesis from scratch.

Feb 2025 — Jul 2026 · Lausanne

Student Representative

EPFL, Life Sciences Engineering

Elected for the 200-student first-year cohort, then for the 140-student second year. Collected feedback weekly by poll and direct input, which fed into changes in course organisation and student support.

Oct 2023 · Budapest

Hematology Intern

Semmelweis University Hospital

50+ hours in the Hematology Department under Prof. Péter Farkas: measuring blood pressure and oxygen saturation, determining blood types, and sitting close to decisions like how to prioritise transfusions when supply does not meet demand.

Recognition

Prizes and roles.

Honours

  • BIO-210 Programming Competition, top recognition EPFL · Dec 2025

    Team of three selected among roughly 180 participants, distinguished for computational efficiency, testing and documentation.

  • Baccalauréat, félicitations du jury Académie de Strasbourg · Jun 2024

    Overall average 19.24/20, high-school valedictorian.

  • National Geosciences Olympiad of AEFE, 3rd place AEFE · Sep 2023

Leadership

  • Faculty Representative AESV, EPFL · Oct 2025 — present

    Member of the Commission of Student Section Representatives.

  • Student Body Representative AGEPoly · Sep 2025 — Jan 2026

    Human and Social Sciences Courses Teaching Commission.

  • Student Integration Coach Coaching EPFL · Aug 2025 — present
  • High School Governing Board Representative Lycée Gustave Eiffel, Budapest · 2022 — 2024

    Governing Board and Conseil de Vie Lycéenne, and eco-delegate on the Sustainable Development Committee.

Writing

Things I have written.

Contact

Write to me.