Hello, my name is Gaia, and I am from Italy.
I am currently working as a PhD researcher at Amsterdam UMC, in the Netherlands. My internal supervisors are Fawad Taj and Mai Chin A Paw, and my external supervisor is Dale Esliger.
My educational background is in law and economics, health policy and health management, with several courses on epidemiology and social sciences research.
Before joining LABDA in Amsterdam, I was working as a junior researcher in health policy at Bocconi University in Italy, an important research center in social sciences, health policy, and health economics, among other subjects. After two years as a Junior fellow in Italy, it was time for me to boost my career with a PhD, and I therefore decided to pursue my doctoral studies abroad. I wanted to discover more about the field of social epidemiology to understand the association between socio-economic and demographic features to health outcomes and health behaviors.
My PhD topic is about intersectionality and 24/7 human movement behaviors.
My research area revolves around assessing social inequalities in healthy lifestyles, specifically active movement behaviors, measured objectively through accelerometers.
Intersectionality is a sociological theory that stems from activist movements such as feminism and anti-racism, which was born in the field of law and gender studies in the 80s in the USA from the innovative mind of Kimberlee Crenshaw, an Afro-American law professor at Columbia University and the University of California Los Angeles.
She studied some legal cases and noticed something was not right. Indeed, in a 1976 case, five black women sued General Motors for a seniority policy that they argued targeted negatively black women exclusively. The company simply did not hire black women before 1964, meaning that when seniority-based layoffs arrived during an early 1970s recession, all the black women hired after 1964 were subsequently laid off. A policy like that did not fall under just gender or just race discrimination. Instead, the court decided that efforts to bind together both racial discrimination and sex discrimination claims — rather than sue on the basis of each separately — would be unworkable. From this and other similar cases, Crenshaw elaborated the concept of Intersectionality to express that the lived experiences and felt stigma from people do not come only from belonging to one social group, but instead from having simultaneously multiple co-existing social identities, which should therefore all be considered when assessing the behavior, barriers, lived experiences and feelings of people in the society.
Indeed, Intersectionality is a lens to describe how race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics “intersect” with one another and overlap.
Intersectionality as a theoretical framework is a relative newcomer to public health, and it leads to looking at the interaction among different social identities when assessing a health behavior or a health outcome, as considering social identities independently considered is not precise enough to grasp social inequalities: indeed, not all women are the same, not all high or low socio-economic positioned people are the same, as there are within-differences partially explained by other social features.
I am trying to apply an intersectional lens to the field of movement behaviors and active lifestyle. I am using this theoretical framework to assess social inequalities in physical behavior and understand how to find the right metrics and methods to use accelerometers to objectively measure sincere and realistic behaviors in more diverse and inclusive samples, so that, ultimately, there will be more clarity on who are the socially-defined groups who are more a risk of being physically inactive, and they can be inclusively targeted by public health interventions and policies.
By continuing research activities in the field of social inequalities in active lifestyle, I hope that we learn more about interactions of social identities and how they impact active lifestyle. Ultimately, researchers will be able to provide useful data to advocate for the inclusion in the WHO guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behavior of a more realistic and sincere representation of the social, socio-economic and demographic differences of more diverse social groups in the population.
My ultimate research question is how we can capture, through the use of accelerometers, the physical behavior of intersectional groups, so that we can understand the effect of the intersection of various social identities (such as gender, ethnicity, age, disability status, SEP and others) on the access to opportunities for an active healthy lifestyle, and to understand the social differences in the association of physical activity with specifc health outcomes. My goal is to help policies in the field of physical activity to be more inclusive, so that ultimately, it will be easier to identify at-risk groups and include them in society through physical activity, as well as open up opportunities for more social groups to be socially active.
Within LABDA, I am the fellows committee chair and a member of the dissemination and communication team. Therefore, I am the coordinator of the 12 LABDA fellows, as well as carrying out activities for the dissemination of our research work and activities through multiple social media channels, among which working towards a “brand” identity of LABDA (managing logo-items, etc.)
Something fun about me: I have a terrible phobia for pigeons and chickens, they really freak the hell out of me; I usually start reading a list from the bottom, and I tend to talk to strangers sitting close to me, or even hug them (when it’s really the case) on the plane when a bit-stronger-than-usual turbulence happens during a flight.
