I am a behavioral economist and computational social scientist with a strong interest in the role of the digital media sphere and its capacity to connect economic and political domains through online discourse. At the core of my research is the investigation of how digital infrastructures and online information ecosystems mediate the emergence and diffusion of public concerns and uncertainty, as well as the platform- and algorithm-mediated coordination of online behaviour, in the political and economic domain.

Drawing on the social sciences and statistical modelling, I examine how individuals and groups form beliefs and expectations and act upon them in the digital public sphere. My work is grounded in behavioural economics, the sociology of communication, and social psychology, and combines digital methods and social science approaches with quantitative modelling, employing methodologies from econometrics, network science, information theory, natural language processing, machine learning, and computational semantics. Even though most of my work is computational, since my PhD I have also been committed to using mixed methods approaches —based on ethnographies, diaries, and semi-structured interviews— which I often analyze using ad-hocv digital methods.

With publications in international journals such as the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society – Statistics in Society, Finance Research Letters, PLOS One, JQD:DM, and Economics Letters, I aim to contribute to a more empirically grounded understanding and theorisation of how digital media and technologies influence the coordination of attention, expectations, online behavior, and collective mobilisation. My research focuses specifically on how these dynamics unfold in response to expressed societal concerns—such as those related to referenda, elections, trade tensions, extreme events, and environmental crises—and their anticipated economic and political consequences.

A central objective of my research has been to understand how cross-domain issues and related narratives—at the intersection of politics and economics—are perceived, communicated, and acted upon. My doctoral dissertation (supervisors: Massimo Warglien & Michele Bernasconi), titled Talking About Uncertainty, defended at the Department of Economics - Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in 2018, laid the foundation for this agenda. It introduced new social media–based metrics to capture collective political and economic uncertainty and model its relationship with market dynamics, particularly financial market volatility. During my PhD, as a invited Odycceus researcher, I also had the opportunity to visit (from February to June 2017) UvA's Media Studies Department and the Digital Methods Initiative in Amsterdam, where I contributed as a researcher and analyst to the first fake news data sprint, led by Prof. Richard Rogers, resulting in a book of digital recipes to counter online disinformation.

In subsequent work, I have examined how digital platforms—like search engines and social media—mediate the formation and coordination of concerns, especially in response to complex events that cross national and institutional boundaries. I have developed models linking digital traces to expectation communication dynamics in cases such as Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic, each offering insight into how public perceptions are formed, mediated by digital technologies, and hence translated into economic (e.g., market fluctuations) and/or political effects (e.g., political agenda setting). This line of inquiry has also extended to sustainability and climate-related risks, with attention to how these issues are constructed and contested in the digital public sphere.

From 2018 to 2023, I taught behavioral economics in the master's programmes in quantitative economics and sustainable finance at Ca’ Foscari University. This role also allowed me to develop an integrated research-led teaching approach, focused on decision-making under uncertainty and on the behavioural foundations of digital coordination. In parallel, I extended the work initiated in my dissertation to explore the role of media-amplified risk perception. As a postdoctoral researcher at the Venice School of Management, I analyzed Google and YouTube search data to measure public attention and concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic and demonstrated its relationship with financial market capitalisation across multiple countries. Published in Finance Research Letters, this study was the first to combine multimodal digital attention and concern metrics for non-economic phenomena, based on search engine data, to market-level outcomes.  

From 2020 to 2024 I co-developed AquaGranda's digital community memory and contributed to the project’s 2022 and 2023 annual editions, as the Research Methods and Tech. lead. My contributions were focused on designing participatory research methods, coordinating citizen science initiatives, and integrating digital and AI tools for data collection and analysis. Additionally, through Stratigrafie Operative, together with the AquaGranda team, and the artists Armin Linke, Giulia Bruno and Lorenzo Mason, we engaged with local rescuers to document their experiences of the 2019 flood, using a collaborative approach to annotate technical materials and photographs related to the event. The AquaGranda project received an Honorary Mention at European Union Prize for Citizen Science, at Ars Electronica, in 2023.

In 2021, I joined the Horizon project ISEED (Inclusive Science and European Democracies), where I led the development of a causal argument extractor and graph-theory-based NLP approaches, to be used to study online deliberations and scientific textual corpora, such as those related to the COVID-related scientific research.  That same year, I also turned to the study of meme stocks as a paradigmatic case of decentralised digitally coordinated behaviour. In this research, together with Matteo Iacopini and Michele Costola, we employed a regime-switching cointegration model to identify a distinct attention-driven dynamic—termed “mementum”—that differentiates these assets from other high-volatility stocks, highlighting the influence of online subcultures and narratives on economic coordination and retail investors’ behavior.

From 2020 to 2024, I led a small research team within the MUHAI project (Coordinator: Rainer Malaka; Scientific Director: Luc Steels) to develop an observatory on the perception of socio-economic inequalities. With Laura Spillner, Inés Blin, Lise Stork, Robert Porzel and other MUHAI researchers, we developed computational and AI tools to analyze and map online debates as networks of actors and themes, shedding light on how digital discourse shapes the representation, legitimization, and contestation of inequality. We also developed ad-hoc NLP approaches and Semantic AI pipelines to transform online social media conversations about social inequalities in semantically rich graphs, capable of capturing at a fine grain the argumentative structure and framing strategies employed in online conversations. 

From January 2022 to may 2024, I was appointed as Assistant Professor (RTD-A) by Ca'Foscari's Venice School of Management (VSM) to work together with Massimo Warglien on the  CISCO x Venywhere research project, where we closely collaborated with Giampaolo Barozzi, CISCO’s Chief Innovation & Technology Officer, and Stafania Cappelli, CISCO Italy's HR Leader, and their teams. During those years, I contributed to CISCO’s research and innovation efforts by designing and implementing new research tools and platform analytics aimed at supporting and studying remote collaboration and work organization among CISCO employees. Our joint research focused on measuring and analysing the dynamics of remote and hybrid work, including aspects such as ICT usage for team communication and coordination, workplace organisation and schedules, performance, collaboration and well-being. I was personally responsible for the mixed-methods research design and data collection strategies, which incorporated participatory approaches, surveys, high-frequency polls via WebEx, workspace booking system design and data analysis, ethnographic methods, interviews, stakeholder workshops, and digital platform-based data collection and analysis.

In spring 2024 I moved to France, and from June 2024 to September 2025, I have been conducting research at the Sciences Po médialab as part of the SoMe4Dem Horizon Europe project. Together with Pedro Ramaciotti and Jean-Philippe Cointet, we developed new methods and models to analyze  identity expression and mobilization on Social Media, and to study how online debates influence real-world socio-economic and political  outcomes;  focusing how political attitudes affect online mobilization,  on online petitions and crowdfunding campaigns as forms of digitally mediated mobilisation.
In October 2025 I joined INRIA Paris and ALMAnaCH's SaLM (Socially-Aware Language Models) interdisciplinary exploratory research initiative led by INRIA Paris and Sciences Po médialab. My research program, titled DemOCrITus (Democratic Discourse and Opinionated Concerns mediated by Identities and Technologies), focuses on the intersection of Computational Social Sciences, Artificial Intelligence, and Behavioural Studies.
In particular, it will examine coordination through digital media and technologies (like Social Media and Conversational AI) and its disorders. The aim is to study digitally-coupled political and market systems and related online phenomena.
In the long run, my main objective is to support the creation and growth of a new joint research team between INRIA Paris and Sciences Po médialab.