Short Bio

I am a postdoctoral researcher, formally trained in engineering, biomedicine and philosophy, currently affiliated with the Italian Institute of Technology, studying social interaction and the self, with a focus on neurosocial minorities, such as autism.

I hold a PhD in Medicine, an MSc in Biomedical Engineering and an MEng in Electrical and Computer Engineering. My PhD “I interact therefore I am: Human becoming in and through social interaction” traced the social origins of human becoming, while reviewing psychopathology as interpersonal misattunement in contraast to a mere brain misfunction of the individual. Prior to my current position I completed postdocs in institutes of neurophysiology, psychiatry and philosophy, as well as worked in professional sectors of artificial intelligence and medical imaging. 

Research Focus

Other people define the way we act and make sense of ourselves and the world around us, perhaps more than what we are used to believe. In two words, we become ourselves in and through social interaction (cf. Lev Vygotsky). Having this thesis as a point of departure, my ultimate goal is to rethink the co-construction of the social world and the self, for eventually informing medical, pedagogical, and general societal practice towards establishing reasonable conditions of life (cf. the concept of interpesonal attunement and interpersonalized forms of medicine, education etc.; Bolis & Schilbach, 2018; Bolis et al., 2023). In my empirical research, I deploy the paradigm of collective psychophysiology (cf. Bolis & Schilbach, 2017; 2020; Bolis et al., 2022). This enables the measurement and analysis of interpersonal attunement in real-time social interactions and beyond across various scales and modalities, ranging from brain function and facial expressions to eye movements, decision-making and subjective experience. Indeed, the multiscale dynamics of social interaction under uncertainty are key to understanding fundamental conceptions about the human condition, such as the self, culture and psychopathology. In a nutshell, to survive, we re-construct the world with others, both physically and conceptually; in doing so, we fundamentally transform not merely the world we are being in, but our being in the world (Bolis & Schilbach, 2018; Fini et al., 2023). In this light, various of the so-called psychiatric disorders can be viewed not as mere (mis-)function within single brains, but rather as misattuned interaction between persons (cf. the dialectical misattunement hypothesis; Bolis et al., 2017). For instance, it has been shown that it is the interpersonal mismatch of autistic traits that primarily predicts friendship quality in the general population and not necessarily these traits per se (Bolis et al., 2020). 

Interaction

Having studied and worked in various places of the world including Italy, Japan, Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, Spain and Greece in a broad spectrum of fields, ranging from psychology, pedagogy and philosophy to neuroscience, artificial intelligence and biomedical engineering, my aim has always been to interact beyond borders, both literally and metaphorically. Please do get in touch in case these lines of thought strike you as relevant.