Associate Professor in Demography and Social Statistics at the Social and Political Science Department, Director of the Bocconi CovidCrisisLab and Research Fellow at the DONDENA Centre for Research on Social Dynamics at Bocconi University where she has been the Principal Investigator of a European Research Centre Starting Grant project aimed at evaluating the effects of demographic changes on infections spread and control in Sub-Saharan Africa (DECIDE project). She holds a Degree in Economics from Bocconi University and a PhD in Biological Sciences from Warwick University. She has worked almost ten years in the Modeling and Economics Unit at the Health Protection Agency (now Public Health England) in London (UK) where she was involved in informing policy decision makers on the introduction of vaccination programs that were under consideration at the UK Department of Health. As part of her research activities she has collaborated internationally on a number of European Union and WHO-funded projects on modeling infectious diseases and evaluating intervention policies both in developed and developing countries. Her main areas of research include quantitative epidemiology, mathematical modeling of infectious diseases, epidemiology and economic evaluation analysis of public health interventions. She is currently working on a NIH-funded project in collaboration with Emory and Yale Universities on the understanding of social contact patterns (person-to-person interactions) for infectious disease transmission in Mozambique, Guatemala, India and Pakistan. She has consolidated strong collaborations with the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI, Kilifi, Kenya) with whom she has been conducting field studies in the past ten years.