About

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology, studying social interaction, the human self, and psychopathology at the intersection of social neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy, and engineering. I hold a PhD in Medicine, an MSc in Biomedical Engineering, and a BSc and MEng in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Research Focus

My research begins from a simple premise: through others, we become ourselves. Social interaction shapes not merely how we act, but also how reality appears to us, including who we are, often more deeply than we assume. Working at the interface of philosophy and empirical science, I argue for an explanatory reversal in which the individual emerges dialectically from the social.

To study this, I use collective psychophysiology, the real-time measurement of interpersonal attunement across brain activity, facial expression, eye movements, decision-making, and subjective experience. Alongside these experiments, I develop two-person computational tools that aim to make the hidden dynamics of coordination visible.

This perspective also reshapes how I approach psychopathology. Rather than locating psychiatric conditions solely inside individual brains, I investigate how they unfold through disturbances in interpersonal attunement. For example, my work has shown that mismatch in autistic traits between people, rather than the traits themselves, is a stronger predictor of friendship quality.

I am currently developing naturalistic paradigms that preserve experimental control while capturing how coordination unfolds in everyday life, from music-based interaction to natural conversation. These approaches reveal how timing, prediction, and affective co-regulation shape experience and relation to others.

A newer frontier of this work is human–AI interaction. If selfhood emerges through interpersonal dynamics, what happens when one partner is an artificial system optimized for high-fidelity mirroring? How might this reshape human communication, and autonomy?

Interaction

Having lived and worked across Italy, Japan, Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, Spain, and Greece, I’ve followed a path that crosses borders, disciplinary as much as geographical, spanning neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, pedagogy, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and biomedical engineering. If any of this resonates, please get in touch. I welcome opportunities for collaboration and exchange, including mentorship, consultancy, and invited academic or professional engagements related to social interaction.