Research Group
Francesco Guala
Professor of Political Economy, Principal Investigator
Francesco Guala holds a B.A. in Philosophy (Milan, 1994) and a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Science (London School of Economics, 1999). In 2001 he won the International Network of Economic Method Prize and the History of Economics Award, both for best article written by a young scholar. His first book, The Methodology of Experimental Economics was published by CUP in 2005. In 2011 he co-edited The Philosophy of Social Science Reader (Routledge). His most recent book, Understanding Institutions (Princeton University Press, 2016) has received the Joseph B. Gittler Award by the American Philosophical Association ‘for an outstanding scholarly contribution in the field of the philosophy of one or more of the social sciences.’
Email: francesco.guala [at] unimi.it
John Michael
Associate Professor of Philosophy of Science
John Michael completed his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Vienna in 2010. He has held faculty positions in philosophy and psychology at the University of Warwick and the University of Stirling (UK), and is currently associate professor at the Cognition and Action Lab at the University of Milan. His research interests include the sense of commitment, self-control, cooperation and joint action. He was the recipient of an ERC starting grant investigating the sense of commitment in joint action (2016-2021), and a winner of the Leverhulme Prize for Early Career Excellence in 2017.
Email: john.michael [at] unimi.it
Caterina Marchionni
Associate Professor of Philosophy of Science
Caterina Marchionni works in the philosophy of science, with a particular focus on the philosophy of the social and behavioral sciences. Her research interests include the epistemology and ethics of modelling the social world; the philosophical foundations of evidence-based and evidence-informed policy; the challenges of interdisciplinarity; and the metaphysical, epistemological and ethical implications of reactivity. In NORSK, she will examine the role of non-epistemic values in the formation of scientific categories, especially when such categories trigger reflexive and performative mechanisms.
Email: caterina.marchionni [at] unimi.it
Francesca Severino
Senior Project Manager, M.A. in Philosophy
Francesca Severino holds a degree in Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology and a Master in Cooperation and Development from IUSS Pavia. She has 20+ years of experience in research management and project coordination, focusing on public health, mental health, and migration. She has worked in Italy, Luxembourg, and China, collaborating with European institutions, academic centers, and research hospitals. In 2006, she won the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes Prize for Excellence in Development Studies.
Email: francesca.severino [at] unimi.it
Francesca Genovese
Lab Manager, Ph.D.
Francesca Genovese graduated in Science of Body and Mind at the University of Turin (2021) and obtained her PhD at the University of Milan (2026). Her research focuses on covert motor processes, including motor imagery, motor preparation, and action observation. With colleagues from the Cognition in Action Lab, she contributed to developing a novel method called “Multidimensional Motor Evoked Potentials”, based on transcranial magnetic stimulation, to investigate intermuscular relationships. Her research interests also extend to body representation and its modulation following joint action tasks, as well as the use of wearable robotics, particularly the Sixth Soft Finger.
Email: francesca.genovese [at] unimi.it
Melissa Berthet
Postdoctoral Researcher
Melissa Berthet studies animal communication to explore other species’ linguistic-like capacities, to understand what makes human language unique and how it evolved. She combines ethological observations and experiments in the field with theoretical linguistic and philosophical work. In NORSK, she will investigate joint commitment in wild mountain gorillas. She obtained her PhD at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland) in 2018, and conducted postdocs at the École Normale Supérieure (France), the University of Zürich (Switzerland) and the University of Rennes (France).
Email: melissa.berthet [at] unimi.it
Sara Papic
Postdoctoral Researcher
Sara Papic obtained her PhD in Philosophy and the Human Sciences in 2026 at the University of Milan. Her research interests encompass the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and metaphysics, with a particular focus on indeterminacy and vagueness. Her work focuses on foundational questions about meaning, including the mechanisms by which the extensions of terms are fixed, the role norms play in the introduction and use of language, and resolving the challenges posed by semantic indeterminacy.
Email: sara.papic [at] unimi.it
Giulia Pedretti
Postdoctoral Researcher
Giulia Pedretti’s research focuses on dog communication, emotional expression, and cooperation, combining advanced behavioral analysis with an interdisciplinary perspective on human-animal interactions. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Parma. Her academic background also includes an M.Sc. in Human-Animal Interactions from the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and a B.A. in Philosophy and Animal Ethics from the University of Milan. Giulia is an experienced dog trainer and is actively involved in dog sports and applied training contexts, promoting ethical, science-based approaches that strengthen dog-human cooperation across domains including detection, sport, and everyday life.
Email: giulia.pedretti1 [at] unimi.it
Davide Serpico
Postdoctoral Researcher
Davide Serpico’s research regards epistemological and ontological questions in biology, medicine, and psychology, among which: the nature and nurture of behavioral phenotypes and diseases; the role of epistemic and non-epistemic values in shaping methods, concepts, and categories in science. During his PhD (2018, Northwest Italy Philosophy Program), he visited the University of Exeter (UK) and the Graduate School for Advanced Studies (Japan). Between 2018-2023, he held visiting and postdoctoral positions at the University of Leeds (UK), the University of Genoa (Italy), the University of Cambridge (UK), the Jagiellonian University (Poland), and the University of Trento (Italy).
Email: davide.serpico1 [at] unimi.it
Adrian Soldati
Postdoctoral Researcher
Adrian Soldati’s research focuses on understanding primate social behaviour and cognition, with a particular emphasis on their communication. Using a comparative approach, he investigates the evolution of key human traits such as language by studying the communication systems of our closest living relatives. His work has mainly focused on wild chimpanzees and leverages field observations to uncover social drivers of communication as well as the ontogeny of vocal capacities.
Email: adrian.soldati [at] unimi.it
Marcell Székely
Postdoctoral Researcher
Marcell Székely seeks to integrate cognitive, social, and evolutionary perspectives to better understand how people perceive and respond to others’ efforts in joint action. Recently, he tested some of the relevant factors that feed into adults’ judgments about the level of others’ effort, and showed that people (at least sometimes) calibrate their own effort investment in the direction of that of a joint action partner – even when it is irrational to do so in the context of the task. Previously, he conducted his Ph.D. research on joint action at the Cognitive Science Department of the Central European University under the supervision of John Michael and Günther Knoblich.
Email: marcell.szekely [at] unimi.it
Martina Valković
Postdoctoral Researcher
Martina Valković obtained her Ph.D. in 2025 from Leibniz University Hannover. Her research has overlapped with topics in epistemology, philosophy of science, social ontology, and social and political philosophy. In her PhD dissertation, she took a critical look at some of the cultural evolutionary theories most dominant today and showed how their ontological and methodological assumptions limit their scope and use, and can lead to negative social and political consequences. She is also active in public philosophy, currently serving as the Public Philosophy beat editor at the Blog of the APA.
Email: martina.valkovic [at] unimi.it
Esther Banki
PhD Student, M.A. in Comparative, Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology
Esther Banki completed her M.A. at the University of St Andrews in 2025. During her studies, she gained research experience investigating causal reasoning in chimpanzees at Edinburgh Zoo, examining how they infer the location of hidden objects using causal cues. Her broader research aim is to integrate comparative and evolutionary perspectives to better understand the evolution of cognition. She is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Milan under the supervision of John Michael, where her research focuses on the evolution of social cognition, specifically the mechanisms underlying joint commitment in canids.
Email: esther.banki [at] unimi.it
Lorenzo d’Addante Trifiletti
PhD Student, M.A. in Philosophy
Lorenzo d’Addante Trifiletti is a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Milan, where he also received his MA in Philosophy. His research lies at the intersection of philosophy of social science, social ontology, and metaphysics. He is particularly interested in ontological questions in the social sciences, especially whether the categories used in social science track real kinds and how epistemic and non-epistemic values shape the individuation and investigation of social phenomena.
Email: lorenzo.daddante [at] unimi.it
Caterina De Gaetano
PhD Student, M.A. in Philosophy
Caterina De Gaetano took her M.A. at the University of Milan with a thesis about the cognitive foundations of money. She is also Young Scholar at Collegio Carlo Alberto (a.y. 2025/2026), by attending the Master in Economics. Her interests lies at the intersection of philosophy and economics, with particular focus on human cognitive interactions with the institutional environment.
Email: caterina.degaetano [at] unimi.it
Anna Geisler
PhD Student, M.A. in Cognition, Behaviour and Neurobiology
Anna Geisler got a M.A. at the University of Vienna (2025) with a focus on cognition and behaviour of birds. In collaboration with the Messerli Research Institute (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), she completed her thesis on the topic of compound tool use in the Goffin’s cockatoo (Cacatua goffiniana). In 2025 she was involved in data collection on the personality of Greylag Geese (Anser anser) and the Northern Bald Ibis (Geronticus eremita) at the Konrad Lorenz Research Center, Vienna. Currently, she is researching the mechanisms of joint commitment and signal reliability in species such as the Common Raven (Corvus corax) and the Kea (Nestor notabilis) at the Haidlhof Research Station (Haidlhof, Austria).
Email: anna.geisler [at] iusspavia.it