The Department welcomes Tommaso Feraco as RTDA from August 2024

I am a passionate psychologist and researcher, primarily focused on individual differences. My research career began with a project in collaboration with a start-up, which sparked my interest in soft skills, their measurement, and development, especially in secondary school students. The innovation, impact, and above all, the challenges associated with this field, such as the lack of defined frameworks and assessment difficulties, have been and continue to be a driving motivational force for me to seek new solutions to expand our understanding and improve how we acquire knowledge about soft skills. The need to push beyond, into a virtually unexplored research field in the department, has led me to develop an extensive network of external contacts and fruitful collaborations with professors like Christopher J. Soto and Samuel Greiff (both engaged with the OECD on the topic of soft skills) and more recently Nathan W. Hudson. Concurrently, my interest has extended to geographical psychology, which aims to define and understand the association between people’s psychological traits and their surrounding environment with an evolutionary perspective as well. All this, however, would not be possible without valuable statistical skills and interests, from measurement issues to the use and understanding of new models for psychological data.
Although I try to maintain a good work/life balance, my free time is never enough, but I like to use it to spend time with my loved ones, read, and since a few years to play the piano.