I am a first generation academic* from Abruzzo (Italy).

I received a BSc and MSc in Economics of Public Administration and International Organisations from Bocconi University in Milan (110/110 cum laude), spending two exchanges at Yonsei (Seoul) and Sciences Po (Paris). During this time, I lived in Collegio di Milano, an Italian experiment to create a college system in Italy founded by Umberto Eco among others.

I then completed a Master in Research in Social Policy at the London School of Economics with distinction and obtained the first and only PhD studentship funded by the publisher Policy Press to conduct my doctoral research on the inequality of the students’ experience during higher education (Student Lives in Crisis).

Before completing my PhD (2015), I obtained a permanent position as Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the University of the West of Scotland in Paisley (Glasgow) (2013). I then moved as Senior/Research Lecturer at Teesside University in Middlesbrough (2015). These early experiences as academic in my late 20s/early 30s in Paisley and Middlesbrough have contributed to my ongoing research interest on the comparative dimension of insecurity and precarity (Insecurity Politics).

In 2017 I moved to the University of Birmingham as Birmingham Fellow. I was later promoted to Associate Professor (2020) and Deputy Head of Research of the College of Social Sciences in (2021). In 2022 I received the Germany Kennedy Memorial Fellowship to spend an entire academic year at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University where I became also an active member of the Cluster on Comparative Inequality and Social Inclusion of the Weatherhead Institute. Before and after this experience, I have been isiting Associate Professor at Sciences Po, Paris at the Centre d'études européennes et de politique comparée (2022) and the AxPo Observatory of Market Society Polarization (2025).

In September 2025 I started a new position as Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge.

*My family received welfare benefits, I was the first person in my extended family to go to University and to an academic high school, and my education has been almost entirely supported by public state funding (diritto allo studio).