What is your role in your university?
I am the Head of International Cooperation of the University of Pisa, so I am in charge of promoting and strengthening collaborations with international partners, student exchange agreements, Joint/Double Degrees and Ph.Ds, scholarships to study abroad, staff mobility, Visiting fellows' scholarships, summer/winter schools, the Foundation Course programme, and receiving foreign delegations and international partners.
What is your role in the Circle U. Alliance?
I am the project coordinator for the University of Pisa. I am trying to create and coordinate a University of Pisa team composed of people in different roles (both staff and students) with different tasks, backgrounds, and responsibilities in order to cover the competencies required by the Alliance. I am also working together with our communication officers to promote initiatives in order to create a sense of belonging shared by everyone in our academic community.
What do you particularly like about your work at Circle U.?
One of the things I like the most is the principle that underlies the European Universities' alliances: the possibility of combining intentions and expertise and working together in an attempt to create a shared supranational educational and research territory, available for all the people involved in the academic community. I really like the excellent opportunity to have a constant commitment between the partners of the Alliance, each of us strong in our own cultural, linguistic, and disciplinary differences, targeting some of the most significant and important topics of the current moment: climate, global health, and, last but not least, democracy.
In the Circle U. European University mission statement, we declare that our nine universities are all comprehensive, research-intensive universities firmly built on the fundamental values of academic freedom and integrity. I believe in what some of the philosophers of the past already said: that the final result we obtain will be greater than the sum of the individual parts that compose it.
Have you had any experience abroad?
I have collaborated and worked with many Universities abroad. Before the pandemic, I spent several weeks in China and Vietnam. Due to a couple of projects I am working on, I have travelled a lot around Central Asian countries (Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbajan), South and Central America (mostly Peru and the Dominican Republic), and, in particular, India, to work with our academic partners and with the diplomatic and consular posts. Concerning the Circle U. partner Universities, in 2014 I spent a week at King’s College for an Erasmus+ Staff Training on internationalisation strategies and the management and promotion of Summer Schools.
If you had a sabbatical year, what would you do?
I have asked myself the same question many times, and I have different answers depending on my mood and the stage of life that I am in. In recent years I have had the idea to walk on the Marco Polo trail along the silk road to Beijing. But I would probably need more than one sabbatical year to complete this because the estimated time for walking the 12,000 km is 480 days!