Laura’s research is mainly focused on embodied enactive approaches to human communication and aims at disentangling how motor repertoires and interactions with objects contribute to gesture and language development in both typical and atypical populations. She has had more than eight years of international and interdisciplinary postgraduate research experience working in academic, laboratory and clinical environments, recently obtaining her second Fulbright scholarship and a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship at University College London (UCL) to carry out a project entitled FORGE. The FORGE project is dedicated to investigating the role of motor skills and functional tool use towards emergence of representational gestures and vocabulary acquisition in children. The project will rely on both behavioral observations and use of motion sensors to measure motoric characteristics of tool use and gestural skills exploited by children’s during word learning.