Dimitris Bolis 

Short Bio

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology, with formal training in engineering, biomedicine, and philosophy. My work centers on social interaction and the self, with a particular 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 doctoral dissertation — I interact, therefore I am: Human becoming in and through social interaction — explored how the self emerges, unfolds and manifests itself in social relations, while reconceptualizing psychopathology as a form of interpersonal misattunement, rather than merely a dysfunction of the individual brain. Prior to my current position, I completed postdoctoral fellowships across neurophysiology, psychiatry, and philosophy, and also worked professionally in artificial intelligence and medical imaging.

Research Focus

My research begins from a simple yet radical premise: through others, we become ourselves. Social interaction shapes not only our behavior but also our very sense of reality—including who we are—perhaps more deeply than we often assume (cf. Bolis, 2020). Here, we aim to rethink the co-construction of the social world and the self, bridging empirical and philosophical approaches. In doing so, our work seeks to inform medical, educational, and societal practices by promoting more relational and context-sensitive frameworks—what might be called interpersonalized approaches to care and pedagogy (Bolis & Schilbach, 2018; Bolis et al., 2023). 

To investigate these processes, we deploy the paradigm of collective psychophysiology (cf. Bolis & Schilbach, 2017; 2020; Bolis et al., 2022), which enables the real-time measurement and analysis of interpersonal attunement across multiple scales and modalities—ranging from brain activity and facial expressions to eye movements, decision-making, and subjective experience. The multiscale dynamics of social interaction are foundational to understanding the human condition, unveiling how selfhood, culture, and psychopathology emerge through the continuous negotiation of uncertainty. 

In this light, psychopathology—across various so-called psychiatric disorders—can be reinterpreted not as a mere dysfunction within individual brains, but as a breakdown in interpersonal attunement (cf. the dialectical misattunement hypothesis; Bolis et al., 2017). For example, research has shown that it is the interpersonal mismatch of autistic traits, rather than the traits themselves, that most strongly predicts friendship quality in the general population (Bolis et al., 2020).  

Extending these insights, our upcoming work examines human–AI interaction as a new frontier for understanding attunement and its consequences. If selfhood emerges through interpersonal dynamics, what happens when one partner is an artificial system optimized for alignment? 

Interaction

Having studied and worked across diverse cultural and academic landscapes—including Italy, Japan, Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, Spain, and Greece—I have pursued a transdisciplinary path spanning psychology, pedagogy, philosophy, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and biomedical engineering. At the heart of my work lies a commitment to interacting beyond borders—both literally and metaphorically. Please do get in touch in case these lines of thought resonate with you.