Project Members

Principal Investigator

Alessia Melegaro is Associate Professor in Demography and Social Statistics at Bocconi University, Department of Social and Political Sciences. She is a Research Associate at Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy. She is an economist by background and a Ph.D. graduate of the Department of Biological Science at Warwick University, UK. She works at the intersection of demography, epidemiology and public health. She is also the Director of the Bocconi Covid Crisis Lab, a multidisciplinary laboratory for research on the epidemiology, economic and social impact of Covid-19 on our societies.

Research Team

Duilio Balsamo is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Bocconi University. His research focuses on Computational Social Science, i.e., understanding individual and collective behaviour using techniques such as Machine Learning, Network Science, and Natural Language Processing on digital data and social media. During his PhD in Modeling and Data Science, he worked on addressing several aspects of the Opioid Epidemic in the US, such as Public Health Monitoring, Pharmacovigilance and Rehabilitation, leveraging Reddit data. He now works on using digital data to understand the behavioural determinants of vaccine uptake/hesitancy and to inform epidemiological models.

Chiara Chiavenna joined the Covid Crisis Lab and Dondena research centre as a full time postdoctoral scientist after completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge and a one-year project at Public Health England. Her research interests focus on statistical models to make inference from longitudinal observational health data, mostly collected through surveillance systems. As a PhD student, she spent 4 years at the MRC Biostatistics Unit, investigating time-series methods to quantify the burden of bacterial respiratory infections secondary to influenza, in seasonal and pandemic settings, from surveillance data. At Public Health England, she worked jointly with the Statistics unit and the HIV department, using counterfactual methods to quantify the impact of interventions: she estimated the excess mortality due to COVID-19 and the effectiveness of HIV prophylaxis within the PrEP Impact trial. Prior to starting her PhD, Chiara completed a degree in Statistics and a Master's degree in Biostatistics at the University of Milano-Bicocca, and did her Master’s thesis at the Karolinska Institute.

Laura Pasqua Leone is a Research Assistant at Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy. Her work focuses on the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy, especially in relation to the COVID-19 vaccines. She investigates the socio-demographic and behavioural determinants of resistance to immunisation, and how they vary between different countries and populations. She holds a MSc in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University.

Lorenzo Lucchini is a post-Doctoral research fellow at Bocconi University, a research fellow at the Center for Health Emergencies (Bruno Kessler Foundation), and a data science research consultant at the World Bank. His research focuses on statistical characterization and mathematical modelling of coordination and collective behaviour dynamics leveraging novel big data streams from social media and mobile phones. His topics of interest range from vaccine hesitancy and information diffusion to conventions and norms formation. He holds a PhD in computer science (complex systems, networks and computational social science) and a MSc in theoretical physics.

Vittoria Offeddu is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Bocconi Covid Crisis Lab and Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy. She is an infectious disease epidemiologist focused on pathogen surveillance, One Health, and behavioural epidemiology within the field of vaccine-preventable diseases. She worked on sero-epidemiological surveillance projects aimed to quantify the circulation of respiratory pathogens in the community and assess the impact of animal infections on human health. She was previously appointed as a Senior Research Fellow at National University of Singapore, where she specialized in the design and execution of mixed-methods studies investigating  the social determinants of vaccine uptake in high-risk groups. She obtained her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology Berlin.

Filippo Trentini is a researcher at Dondena Centre on Social Dynamics and Public Policy and an affiliate of the Center for Health Emergencies at Fondazione Bruno Kessler. He holds a PhD in Statistics. His work focuses on developing transmission models for infectious diseases like measles, influenza and Covid-19 to investigate their long-term dynamics in different socio-economic contexts. This allows both to characterize different types of infections and their interplay with mobility, social contact patterns and demographic components, and to evaluate the effectiveness of a wide range of possible interventions in terms of averted costs and burden.

Elena D'Agnese is a Research Assistant at Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy. Her main research interest is the role of human behavior in the spread of infectious diseases both at the individual and public level, in particular in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. She holds a M.Sc. in Economic and Social Sciences (ESS) from Bocconi University.