Unibo Edition 2021

Luca Bondi - 1st Finalist

Luca Bondi is a PhD fellow in Nanoscience for Medicine and Environment at the Department of Physics. The title of his PhD thesis is: "Shed light where water meets plastics: a new hope for a greener world fighting diseases". His PhD project studies how the interface between organic materials and water behaves when light is shone on them. The implications of the possible processes are manifold: in the field of nanomedicine, possible outcomes include the development of an organic-polymer nanoparticle device to restore cardiac function and vascularization, by modulating fate and proliferation of main cardiovascular cell types or of soft, organic, biocompatible retina implants; in the field of energy, these researches can be exploited to develop a large-scale, cost-effective, environmentally friendly way to stock sunlight into hydrogen or other zero-carbon emission fuels.

2nd Finalist

Vittoria Laghi is a 3rd year PhD student at the Department of Civil, Chemical, Environmental, and Materials Engineering. The title of her research is: "Study of innovative steel 3D-printing process for structural engineering applications". Her PhD project provides a preliminary example in the application of computational structural design for steel elements fully realized in WAAM (Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing). Through ad-hoc computational design tools, it is possible to use materials efficiently, both in terms of weight reduction and structural performances resulting in a highly aesthetical solution that could also be used for high-impact architectural buildings along the lines of the Guggenheim museum in New York or Paris’ Centre Pompidou.

3rd Finalist

Caterina Morganti is a 3rd year PhD Student at the Department of Architecture. The title of her research is: "The digitalized management of processes between theory and practice: Historical/Heritage Building Information Modelling". Her PhD project has a twofold purpose: on the one hand, to study and apply 3D modeling production, and, on the other hand, to define the criteria and the application methods of Historical/Heritage Building Information Modelling (H-BIM). Within this framework, her research investigates the range of potential applications of this methodology. Indeed, by adopting an informative template for the execution of digital projects, her research project can impact the management and conservation of every artwork characterized by a high technological content or significant interconnection among architectural and structural aspects.

Yannick Lahti is a Finnish-Belgian PhD student in Political Science. His PhD project focuses on populism through the relation between Legacy Media and Digital Media in the context and time frame of the European Union elections of 2019 in Finland, Italy and The Netherlands. His goal is to investigate how populism as a concept and populists as active actors emerge from legacy media and tweets on Twitter while observing how populists themselves communicated during this time window. By engaging with multiple voices and perspectives, this research will provide valuable and novel results on how populism as a theme and a concept is being portrayed in the context of the European elections of 2019 both on Twitter and legacy media, but also in general: monitoring both future elections and populism.

Chiara Xausa is a 3rd year PhD student at the Department of Interpreting and Translation. Her PhD project analyses several works of speculative fiction by contemporary women-identified authors who approach the subject of climate change from various cultural perspectives and propose a counterintuitive planetary subjectivity from below. By raising questions like “how is the notion of the Anthropocene challenged and reimagined in contemporary feminist, postcolonial and indigenous theory and fiction?”, this project intends to shed light on the relationship between climate change, global capitalism and a flat trust in techno-fixes on the one hand, and structural inequalities generated by patriarchy, racism, and intersecting systems of oppression on the other.

Olga Trunova is a 3rd year PhD student at the Department of Management and a fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Bologna. Her PhD project focuses on how and by whom the concept of smart city has been adopted in the Russian context both at the national and local levels and how these processes evolve from the governance perspective.

Silvia Granata is a PhD student in Biotechnological, Biocomputational, Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological Sciences. Within her PhD research, she studies the toxicological effects associated to the use of electronic cigarettes. The ultimate goal of this PhD project is to raise awareness among both electronic cigarette users and government agencies of the real risks of these devices. In this way, users can make an informed decisions about their preferred way of quitting cigarettes and government agencies can protect citizens’ health using the necessary means.

Margherita D’Alessandro is a second-year Ph.D. Student in Food Science and Biotechnology. With her research, she works for women’s well-being and this is her career goal. The main aim of her PhD project is to verify the metabolic aptitude and several technological and functional properties of a group of vaginal lactobacilli for their inclusion as adjunct cultures in a fermented food to promote women’s wellbeing. The data from this research could have positive repercussions in the food industry with food specifically designed for women.

Sara Coluccelli is a 3rd year PhD student in the programme of Health & Technologies at the University of Bologna. Her PhD project presents a perfusion-based 3D Ovarian Cancer model that could represent an innovative and promising research model capable to faithfully mimic the complex nature of the original tissue.

Giuseppe Lamberti is an Oncologist and PhD student in Medical Oncology. His PhD consists of a clinical trial of chemotherapy, immunotherapy and anti-Vascular Growth Factor (VEGF) therapy together in Small-Cell Lung Cancer (SCLC) patients with the aim of testing its efficacy in improving survival. The trial is ongoing, full results will be available when 52 patients will be enrolled and followed up for one year. His aim is to have a 70% survival rate among the patients treated for one year with the abovementioned method, compared to 50% of those who underwent chemotherapy and immunotherapy.

Riccardo Proietti is a PhD student in Psychology. His project employs fundamental principles in Artificial Intelligence to develop a computer simulation of the neural system that encodes our ability to understand the intentions and the meanings of other individuals’ actions. By manipulating specific parameters in the simulated brain, virtual damages in specific areas of the action recognition system can be created and thus degrees of impairment at the behavioural level of their ability to understand actions can be observed. In this way, simulated results can be compared against the real clinical population, eventually leading to a model to generate clinically relevant predictions and more targeted treatments.

Daniel Gracia Perez is a Spanish PhD student in Law. His PhD research investigates how to protect victims of climate change from the perspective of International Public Law. Starting from the assumption that a State or part of its territory disappearing and being swallowed up by the ocean is an actual possibility and no longer a mere speculation, his PhD project investigates the processes creating climate refugees and seeks policy-oriented solutions to the impact of natural disasters and climate change on human mobility.

Luca Pagani is a PhD student of Physics, his PhD project studies a class of theories, called Effective Field Theories or EFT, to detect the features and the properties of the right theory, incidentally, explaining why the sky is blue. Luca focuses on dark energy related to the expansion of the Universe. However, no one knows why the Universe is expanding when the only relevant interaction at such a big scale is gravity, which instead seeks to decrease the distance between galaxies.

Riccardo Nanni is a PhD student in International Relations. Through interviews with Chinese and Western experts, policy-makers and technologists involved in managing and standardising the Internet’s basic protocols and mobile Internet technologies, Riccardo maintains Chinese actors have little to no interest in fragmenting the Internet despite being framed as the most likely state actor in this process by the West.