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A PhD Candidate in Health Economics with an eye for design—just one eye, though.

My interests in short:

How genes shape who responds to policy, like tobacco taxes
Econometrics, machine learning and AI in economic research
What sudden loud noise does to health
How we age, and how chronic disease builds up

About Me

Me, my interests and some other stuff.

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Research Interests & Projects

The projects I'm currently working on and my research interests.

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Finding My Academic Voice, a Predoc’s thoughts on Presenting Work

Everyone says it is important to tell a story, that's easy, what is so difficult about presenting then?

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Conferences

Conferences I've presented at or attended.

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Finding My Academic Voice, a Predoc’s experience on Presenting Work

My name is Pietro, I am a Pre Doctoral Researcher in Economics at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.

Premise.

I am jotting down this text on my phone as I ride in a train after a not so great performance presenting my work. I have been thinking about the following stuff for quite a while, I hope that it is useful for someone other than me to gather some thoughts on why I am doing this. I decided to do the PreDoc experience before entering a PhD (still looking btw!) because I wanted to get a hint of what it means to actually do research. I have the incredible fortune of working with Andrea, Francesca, Federico and Vincenzo at Tor Vergata, they all have taught me so much in the almost year that I have been working with them. They always treat me with kind suggestions and I care for them. They also allow me to conduct my own research and do not limit my job to “clean this data for me”. I am somewhat of an overflowing pool of emotions. While I appreciate this quality, which allows me to quickly understand how an individual feels about something and empathise, it quickly bites me when stressful situations arise.

Presenting is a challenging task that requires multiple skills working in harmony: thinking quickly on your feet, demonstrating deep knowledge of the literature, adapting your presentation to stay within time constraints even when questions arise, managing your emotions under pressure, and speaking clearly in fluent English.

Now, what follows are some key steps (in no particular order of importance) that with time I found very useful to potentially prepare a better presentation:

Flexibility of your speech is fundamental. I found myself making better presentations without preparing and memorising a whole script: it is time consuming, energy intensive for the brain and it gives you less wiggle room to adjust your presentation. When making slides, start figuring out what you are going to say in that slide.
Prepare additional slides to put at the end of the presentation and have ready-to-click links in the main ones, so you have a support in case someone asks a hard question, plus you seem well prepared.
Look for typos in your slides — I know it is obvious, but it makes the presentation look sloppy otherwise.
When someone asks a question, take your time to think before answering. I know it can seem impressive to respond quickly to anything, but no one’s in a rush. To me, taking a moment to reflect shows that you care about the question and want to give your best answer.
Do not be afraid to postpone the answer to after the presentation has ended. A good approach is to give a brief answer and leave the rest for after your presentation.
Grab a friend/coworker (that kinda knows what you are talking about) to review your presentation beforehand. Do not present to the aforesaid individual (you are already bothering another living creature enough), just carefully review together your slides. This helps a lot: you inevitably build an idea of how the presentation will flow, plus having other eyes look at your work can spot typos and useful questions.
Provide the whole context of your work, even if you think people in the audience are going to know what you are talking about. At worst, they are going to tune out the first part of the speech. At best, you are going to skip a round of questions and in the end you are going to save anyone’s time.
Do not present tables the size of Jupiter, or if you really feel the need to, please highlight the important numbers you want to draw the attention to. My thumb rule is: if you have to squint to understand what is going on in the table, you have to change the table format/layout.
A plot should:
- Be easy to read,
- Be beautiful (you have enough tools to make it so. Look for color palettes that match together),
- Not be the prettier version of a table — otherwise use that. Use a plot to actually convey a message. Come up with more interesting measures to plot, e.g. O/E Ratios instead of plain simple disease prevalence in population.

Final thoughts.

Presenting is hard, I know. I am still learning how to do it properly and I will probably never master it. However, I believe that with time and practice anyone can get better at it. The key is to be kind to yourself, learn from your mistakes, and keep pushing forward. Remember, every great presenter started where you are now.

If you have any questions or want to share your own tips on presenting, feel free to reach out to me!

Cheers,

Meet Pietro: part-time economics nerd, full-time overthinker of font choices. When I'm not pretending to understand economics or making things look pretty through design, you'll find me hiking mountains to escape research papers. I also spend Sundays watching cars going in circles at 300kph like a completely rational adult.

I earned my Bachelor's at the University of Florence, developing a foundation in economic theory and discovering that Python makes economic modeling very engaging. My thesis involved replicating a dynamic Cournot duopoly with emission taxes – and yes, creating those visualizations was more fun than it probably should have been. My Master's from Tor Vergata specialized in health economics and econometrics, where I learned that healthcare data tells some of the most compelling stories in economics. My thesis examined how multiple chronic profiles influence healthcare utilization, combining my interest in both human welfare and statistical analysis. Beyond academia, I've remained deeply committed to community engagement and public discourse. In late 2022, I joined in founding "Nuova Energheia," an association dedicated to cultural promotion and public education in the Mugello region. The association emerged organically from several events we had previously organized in collaboration with local municipalities – we realized there was both a need and an opportunity to create something more structured and sustained. Our goal was to establish an organization that could work alongside local administrations to raise public awareness about pressing contemporary issues, particularly those touching on environmental and social themes.

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Duisburg-Essen, where my research is supervised by Prof. Martin Karlsson and funded through the HEPARD Marie Skłodowska-Curie doctoral network, part of the EU Horizon Europe programme. Most of my work asks why people respond so differently to the same policy or the same environment, and what that means for their health.

My main focus is genoeconomics: using genetic data to understand economic behaviour and health. Polygenic indices summarise a person's genetic predisposition for a trait, such as smoking heavily or finding it hard to quit. They are fixed at conception, so they measure a kind of heterogeneity that policy cannot move. With Kinshuk Taneja I combine polygenic indices from the Health and Retirement Study with decades of US state tobacco taxes to ask who quits when cigarettes get more expensive, and what quitting is worth for their health. The hard part is that genes can shape both who responds to a tax and how much they gain from quitting, and a standard instrumental variables estimate mixes the two up. Marginal treatment effects let us pull them apart. I am also preparing a related project on how people with different genetic endowments respond to retirement reforms.

The second thread is method. I work mostly with instrumental variables under heterogeneous effects, marginal treatment effects, and difference-in-differences and event-study designs. I am interested in machine learning where it helps causal inference, for example generative models that can adjust for the hundreds of confounders a rich ageing survey gives you. I also care about how AI is changing the way economists do research, and I give talks to colleagues on using AI coding agents in empirical work, from setting up a project to replicating a published paper.

Third, with Sotiris Vandoros at UCL I study the acute effects of noise on health. Noise policy is usually built on average exposure over a year, but people who live near airports also hear a handful of very loud events. We ask whether those peaks harm health, through hospital admissions, prescriptions and self-reported health, beyond what average noise levels would predict.

Ageing is where I started. Growing up in Italy, one of the countries with the oldest populations in the world, I have always been fascinated by the ageing process and its socioeconomic implications. With Andrea Piano Mortari and Francesca Marazzi I use hidden Markov models on SHARE, ELSA and the HRS to trace how people move from good health into complex multimorbidity, and how age, sex and education shape each transition. With Jamie Christy and Mikhail Kan I am bringing these trajectories into a project on whether German private long-term health insurance contracts are well designed.

I am currently involved in the following projects:

STAGE

Stay Healthy Through Ageing

OBELISK

Tackling Childhood Obesity to Stay Healthy for Life

Aviation Noise Project

Health effects of aircraft noise in the UK, US and France

STAGE is a European Research and Innovation project studying healthy ageing and multi-morbidity using a life-course approach.
OBELISK is a European-funded research project with the ambition of preventing childhood obesity and promoting better health, quality of life, and longevity for individuals of all ages in Europe.
Aviation Noise Project is a joint project with Sotiris Vandoros at University College London, using UK, US and French data to study the health effects of aircraft noise around airports.

In STAGE and OBELISK I am tasked with conducting the main econometric analyses, using advanced statistical techniques to uncover insights from complex datasets. My work involves identifying patterns in healthcare utilization, understanding the impact of multiple chronic conditions on health outcomes, and providing evidence-based recommendations for policy and practice.

The European Expotypes project:

I am also involved in the operationalization and implementation of Expotypes in Europe. Collaborating with Imperial College London, I am working on the development of a comprehensive framework for Expotypes, which will be used to identify and classify individuals based on their exposure to various environmental, lifestyle and biological factors. This framework will be instrumental in understanding how these factors influence health outcomes.

Current Research Interests:

Genoeconomics: polygenic indices, gene-environment interplay and who responds to policy
Health behaviours and tax policy, especially smoking
Econometrics: causal inference with heterogeneous effects, instrumental variables, marginal treatment effects, event studies
Machine learning for causal inference, and AI in economic research
Acute noise exposure and health
Economics of ageing: multimorbidity, retirement and cognition

Here are some of the conferences I have presented at or attended:

Jan 2026

ALP POP 2026 - DODENA, Bocconi University

La Thuille, Italy

Presenter

Dec 2025

XXX Italian Health Economics Association (AIES) NATIONAL CONFERENCE

Verona, Italy

Presenter

June 2025

OBELISK Project General Assembly

Berlin, Germany

Presenter

May 2025

STAGE Project General Assembly

Barcelona, Spain

Presenter

Dec 2024

XXIX Italian Health Economics Association (AIES) NATIONAL CONFERENCE

Naples, Italy

Presenter

Sept 2024

Exposome Analyitics Conference

Nice, France

Attendee

What's up? 👋🏻

About Me

Research Interests & Projects

Finding My Academic Voice, a Predoc’s thoughts on Presenting Work

Conferences

What's up?

👋🏻