An AXA Post-Doc Fellowship to Nicoletta Balbo

Nicoletta Balbo (Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics) is the recipient of a two-year AXA Research Fund Post-Doctoral Fellowship and her research project Adolescent Substance Use: Assessment of Risk Factors and Risk Prevention in a Comparative Perspective, to start in December 2013, will be funded with € 120,000.

Balbo was chosen at the end of "one of the most competitive selection processes in the world for a post-doc grant", Ross Macmillan, Dondena's director, says.

The research project will study substance use among adolescents both at the individual and social levels through a comparative international perspective. Existing research is mostly limited to the US and, sometimes, to the Netherlands, because of its unique liberal drugs policy, but there is little truly comparative work.

A unique feature of the work is examination of perceptions of risk that should be an important driver of behaviour, but have not been studied in prior work.

The AXA Fellowships are assigned, in a first stage, to a research institution and in a second stage to a single scholar affiliate to the research institution. "In the first stage it's likely been decisive the presence at Bocconi of such specialists of decision processes as Massimo Marinacci, who holds the AXA-Bocconi Chair in Risk", Balbo says.

"Nicoletta's project is one of the few social sciences projects funded with the Fellowship", Macmillan underlines. "In the life-risk field it was the only social sciences proposal amid many medical ones".