I am a Postdoctoral Scholar in Engaged Ethics at the Rock Ethics Institute and The Schreyer Honors College at the Pennsylvania State University. I do research within the Empathy & Moral Psychology Lab and I am at work to develop a new ethics curriculum for The Schreyer Honors College.
I am an affiliate member of Penn State's Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence (CSRAI) and of at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where I am collaborating on a research project on trust in science about “Persuading Under Uncertainty” (PI: Ophelia Deroy).
In 2022 I will also be a Marc Sanders Foundation Philosophy in the Media Fellow.
I did my graduate work at McGill University where I was a member of the Research Center for Ethics (CRE) and of the Interuniversity Research Group on Normativity (GRIN), which I also coordinated in 2016-2017. Before joining Penn State, I was a Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
My research interests are broad and range across philosophy of mind and action, ethics, epistemology, and moral psychology. I have a longstanding interest in practical irrationality, particularly self-control and self-deception, where I have worked on developing an account of what it is to come out of self-deception.
More recently, I have been working on conspiratorial beliefs and why they tenaciously persist over time as well as on the reasons that fuel and sustain vaccine-hesitancy. I am also working on a project about resilience where I propose that we abandon the traditionally individualistic notion known to undermine structural injustices and cause burnout in favour of a relational account of resilience. I will be presenting a nascent version of this project at the Panel on the Status of Women at the Pacific Division of American Philosophical Association that will take place in April 2022.
Outside of my day job, I have a strong commitment to public philosophy and have published my work in several popular venues. In 2019, I published (in The Conversation) an article on why good character testimonies do not constitute a defence for sexual harassment. And in 2020-2021 I was a regular columnist at The Prindle Post, where I wrote about ethics and social philosophy. Since 2017 I have been one of the hosts of a weekly radio show on air on CFMB1280, where I have had the opportunity to talk philosophy with a wider audience.
I am originally from Italy. I did my B.A. at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ and my M.A. at the University of Florence.