Fabiola Diana
Early-Career Fellow 2026–2027

Fabiola Diana (born 1993 in Turin, Italy) is a social neuroscientist interested in how the social brain evolved to navigate both human-human and human-robot interaction. Her interdisciplinary work combines multimodal psychophysiology with naturalistic settings to study how the human social and moral system responds to humans, as well as to partners it never evolved to meet, such as artificial agents. At the Collegium, she will study the neural, physiological, and behavioral dynamics of moral decision-making, examining whether these dynamics extend to interactions with artificial entities, and deepening the philosophical and ethical dimensions of these questions.

Fabiola received her PhD from Leiden University (NL) in 2026, where she investigated how interpersonal alignment shapes moral behavior in interactions with humans and artificial agents. Before joining the Collegium, she held a postdoctoral position at Utrecht University (NL). Fabiola's research spans different fields, integrating approaches from social neuroscience, human-robot interaction, and evolutionary biology. For this interdisciplinary approach, she was awarded the Human-Robot Interaction Pioneer Award in 2025.