Raffaella Rumiati

Professor and Director of the iNSuLa Laboratory at SISSA (Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati)

Raffaella Ida Rumiati obtained a MS in philosophy with a psychology curriculum in 1990, and a Doctorate in Psychology in 1995 (both from the University of Bologna). The research towards Doctorate was carried out at the School of Psychology of Birmingham University, U.K., for 4 years, focusing on the interface between perception and action. After completing the Doctorate she moved to the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy, where from a postdoctoral position she moved up to a full professorship in cognitive neuroscience in 2011. Here she is the Director of the Neuroscience and Society Laboratory (iNSuLa, http://insula.sissa.it).To date she has about 120 peer-reviewed articles, and about 30 reviews, commentaries and book chapters. In her work she has been investigating the relationship between the brain, cognition and behaviour in healthy individuals as well as in brain/damaged patients. In recent years her research had concentrated on economical decisions and food preferences and choices.

She was the recipient of the “von Humboldt Foundation” Bessel Prize in 2003, and of the Women in Cognitive Science Mentorship Award in 2006. She is an editor for Brain and Cognition and Cortex, and on the board of Cognitive Neuropsychology and Journal of Neuropsychology; she also acts as a reviewer for many journals as well as for funding agencies. She gave about 100 invited talks in Italy and abroad, and spent several working periods abroad (e.g., Germany, U.K., Japan). During over 20 years in SISSA she had several organizational roles including head of the Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience, head of the SISSA’s Ethics Committee, member of SISSA’s Board of Governors, and member of the Academic Senate. From November 2015 she joined the National Agency for the Evaluation of the University System and Research (ANVUR), of which she is Vice-President. Her main interest is to develop a new program that allows measuring cognitive and non-cognitive skills to predict education, occupation and income outcomes.