Peter Neri graduated from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. He then trained between Britain and California, starting with a PhD in Oxford followed by 3 brief postdocs at Stanford, Cambridge, and UC Berkeley. He was subsequently supported by a University Research Fellowship from the Royal Society, and went on to become a CNRS Director of Research at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. After several decades abroad, he returned to his homeland as a Senior Researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology.
His core interest is to understand how sensory signals are processed by neural devices to drive and control behavior. Here, 'understand' means being able to account for all measurable aspects of sensory processing through physiologically plausible mathematical models. A key feature of his work is the tight integration between experimental characterization on the one hand, and computational accounts of the empirical results on the other. He has studied various visual and auditory phenomena, ranging from motion processing in fly neurons to natural image understanding in humans.