Sociologist based in Milano, Italy. Mainly interested in:

• the link between relationships of economic exchange, solidarity, and inter-group conflict
• peer-review evaluation in scientific publishing
• integrating Social Network Analysis (SNA) with Agent-Based Modelling (ABM)

Assistant professor of sociology at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Milan (Italy), member of the BehaveLab.

Teaching a graduate course on Social Network Analysis.

Author of Reti sociali. Meccanismi e modelli, covering my recent methodological studies on statistical and computational models of social networks, with a few empirical examples (for Italian readers). Here you can find a few presentation slides (in Italian) summarizing its content.

News

17-10-24: A podcast interview (in Italian) by Gianluca Argentin on my book “Reti sociali. Meccanismi e modelli” (Il Mulino, 2023).

30-9-24: New open access article out on The Journal of Early Adolescence: “Friends can Help to aim high: peer influence and selection effects on academic ambitions and achievement”. Along with Eszter Vit, Marco Castellani, and Károly Takács, we found in a rich longitudinal network dataset of Hungarian early teenagers that their academic ambitions were influenced by those of their school friends beyond their own and their friends’ actual achievements, controlling for homophilous friends’ selection. Here’s a thread on X.

2-9-24: The 2024 Behave Summer School starts today and I am honoured to be part of the faculty also this year. It’s organised by the Behave Lab at the University of Milan and the University of Brescia. We will teach a selected class of students (both on site and online) to conceptualise, code, simulate, estimate, and analyse agent-based models, in two weeks of hands-on training in Brescia, Italy. I will also teach about agent-based models of social networks together with Francesco Renzini.

30-5-24: Today I am presenting a working paper on “Complex contagion and negative influence in the adoption of malaria preventive measures: an empirical agent-based model” (with Elisa Bellotti & Francesco Renzini) at the 16th Annual Conference of the International Network of Analytical Sociology at Leipzig University (Germany). Here are my presentation slides.