45.9411°N 13.6222°E · Gorizia 46.1300°N 23.5400°E · Celna
Neurotech × Medicine
Life Sciences Engineering at EPFL, somewhere between two paths I love — medicine and neuroscience — and slowly figuring out that the answer might just be both.
I meant to become an anthropologist. Human imagination and intelligence fascinated me, so I went looking for them in politics and then in psychology — and ran into the same dissatisfaction each time. Those fields study human relationships beautifully, but personality is contingent and culture-dependent, and I wanted something underneath that: a general model of how the brain actually 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, and left convinced there was still so much to unlock — in how diseases are detected, and in how the brain could be interfaced with technology. That conviction is why I chose life sciences engineering over medical school: I wanted to understand both worlds deeply enough to help bridge 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.
I want to operate on the brain and build the things that extend what surgery can do — not as competing ambitions, but as one coherent one. The kind of goal that takes twenty years and looks slightly unreasonable from the outside, which is usually a good sign.
Laidlaw research internship at EPFL's Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience. I built an online experimental application testing whether the sense of agency — the feeling of controlling one's actions — strengthens episodic memory, and added confidence ratings to the recognition protocol.
Research reportR&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–memory neuroscience, to help stroke patients recover.
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 — showing text inscription explains ~10× more visual variance than colour or figure content, and surfacing three expressive clusters mapped onto diagnoses.
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 teams and jurors, culminating in an international final at EPFL with finalist teams from Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
Read the recapAn 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 ~180 participants.
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
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Grade 5.3/6. Coursework spanning cell & molecular biology, biochemistry, signal processing, numerical analysis, machine learning and biostatistics.
Full-year exchange in Stockholm focused on medical engineering, machine learning for health, neuroscience and biomedical signal processing.
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.
Valedictorian with highest honours, 19.24/20, mention très bien avec les félicitations du jury. Student-council representative and eco-delegate; two years of MATh.en.JEANS research.
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.
EPFL Sustainable Innovation Challenge
Led the design of the challenge and the selection of both participating teams and jurors for Europe's first student-led sustainability forum of its kind, uniting students, researchers and industry leaders for an international final at EPFL.
Read the recapLNCO, Neuro-X Institute, EPFL — Laidlaw Scholar
Eight-week full-time research internship on the EPFL Biotech Campus, investigating the links between the sense of agency and episodic memory. Designed, programmed and deployed an online experimental platform for large-scale data collection.
Research reportEPFL, BIO-110
Teaching assistant for Prof. Bruno Correia's course: weekly exercise sessions, exercise sheets and revision lectures, and a final lecture on amino-acid structure, sequencing and peptide synthesis designed from scratch.
EPFL — Life Sciences Engineering
Elected representative for the first- and second-year cohorts, around 340 students, channelling peer feedback into tangible changes in course organisation and student support.
Semmelweis University Hospital
Clinical internship in the Hematology Department under Prof. Péter Farkas — an early, formative encounter with the human side of medicine.
Team of three selected among ~180 participants; distinguished for computational efficiency, testing and documentation.
Overall average 19.24/20, high-school valedictorian.
Member of the Commission of Student Section Representatives.
Human and Social Sciences Courses Teaching Commission.
Initiated and organised a school-wide collection for victims of the 2023 Turkey earthquake, after a classmate was directly affected.
Governing Board and Conseil de Vie Lycéenne; eco-delegate on the Sustainable Development Committee.
On the hematology ward in Budapest that convinced me the answer wasn't medicine or engineering — it was both.
Read May 2026 · LausanneEleven months of building a challenge from scratch, eight finalist teams, and what I learned about the gaps that let ideas scale.
Read September 2025 · GenevaInside my Laidlaw summer at EPFL's LNCO: building an online experiment, wrestling with AI-assisted coding, and what the data is starting to show.
ReadMy work is scientific, but design considerations shaped a great deal of how I think and how I approach science — what to make visible, what to leave out, how structure carries an argument before a single word is read. So I wanted this site built with those considerations in mind rather than assembled from a template.
That instinct is inherited. Kévés György, my grandmother's second husband and an architect, was the first person who made me want to design things at all — for a long time he was the reason I intended to become an architect. My grandfather Czelnai Rudolf, a meteorologist, taught me to read the world as systems: pressure fields, evolutionary branches, the habit of drawing a phenomenon before claiming to understand it. The contour lines behind this section and the branching diagram below come directly from that.
My father Serge Siniciali works in hydraulic energy — flow, pressure, the engineering of moving water. My mother Czelnai Éva worked as a journalist and an interpreter, which is where the languages and the conviction that an idea only counts once it is understood by someone else both come from.
The palette holds the two places I come from. Ochre, terracotta and Adriatic blue are the colours of Gorizia and the Friuli — my Italian roots, and the region of the Italian rationalists who ran the Bauhaus argument in their own accent. The green and the stone-beige belong to Celna, in Transylvania, the village the Czelnai name comes from. The shapes are Johannes Itten's Bauhaus grammar: triangle, square, circle — assigned here, once, and then used consistently.
Itten's triangle, the sharpest shape. Also Friuli in autumn.
Weight and material — the brick of northern Italian building.
Motion without end; the sea an hour south of Gorizia.
Transylvanian hills and the Alps on both sides of the family.
Istrian stone, and the drawing sheet everything is set on.