“No man is an island, entire of itself” (John Donne)

Hello there!

I am a Ph.D. student in the Doctoral Programme of National Interest in Life Course Research at the University of Pisa, in collaboration with the University of Florence. I am also a Research Assistant at the DONDENA Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy of the Bocconi University, working in the IMMUNE ERC Project (PI: Prof. Alessia Melegaro).

My Ph.D. work focuses on disentangling the effect of individual protective behaviours and public policies on the spread of SARS-CoV-2 during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially using methodologies from statistics and causal inference. In general, I am interested in the feedback loop between human behaviour and infectious disease spread, particularly considering the concept of “human behaviour” as a spectrum of interconnected agents, from micro- to meso- and macro-level entities, whose interplay may favor or hinder any action towards protection against infectious diseases. The main objective of my research is to enhance pandemic preparedness and pandemic response guidelines, taking into account the pervasiveness of human behavioural response. In my Ph.D. research, I am supervised by Prof. Piero Manfredi, Prof. Nicola Salvati, and Prof. Barbara Pacini. Other related topics of interest, on which I work with the IMMUNE ERC project team at Bocconi University with Prof. Alessia Melegaro, include vaccine hesitancy and determinants of protective behaviour adoption.