Mental and Physical Disability
June 3-7, 2019 (7th edition)
Extended deadline: April 15th 2019
VIU Scientific Coordinator: Agar Brugiavini, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice & VIU
In 2019 the Summer Institute on Ageing will reach its 7th edition. The Summer Institute provides students and early-career researchers with a multidisciplinary and rigorous understanding of the ageing process, ranging from some basic notions of the medical and epidemiological literature, to an extensive treatment of economics (pensions and retirement, ageing in society and intergenerational relationships) and of the sociological dimensions (intergenerational transfers, role of family networks).
A special focus is the use of large micro-data sets, such as SHARE (Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe) and sister surveys (HRS, ELSA, CHARLS)
Organising Committee: Agar Brugiavini, Stefania Maggi, Jürgen Maurer, Giacomo Pasini, Guglielmo Weber.
Contributing member universities:
• Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
• National Research Council of Italy
• University of Lausanne
• University of Padua
The following scientists and researchers will contribute to 2019 Summer Institute on Ageing:
James Banks, Manchester University, UK
Luigi Ferrucci, National Institutes on Aging (NIA), USA
Howard Litwin, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, IL
Pierluigi Nicotera, German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), DE
Stefania Maggi, Institute of Neuroscience, National Research Council of Italy, IT
Jürgen Maurer, University of Lausanne, CH
Jean-Pierre Michel, University of Geneva, CH
Giacomo Pasini, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, IT
Guglielmo Weber, University of Padua, IT
Stephanie Stuck, Munich Center for the Economics of Aging (MEA), DE
Anja Leist, University of Luxemburg, L
Maarten Lindeboom, Free University of Amsterdam, NL
Which are the main activities?
• Presentations in the fields of biomedicine, geriatrics, genetics, epidemiology, patient care, psychiatry, as well as economics of ageing, pension economics and finance, health economics, public health, demography and sociology;
• Hands-on sessions: presentation of the survey data on ageing available to the scientific community focusing on datasets such as SHARE;
• Poster sessions and other activities: discussing the participants’ research with the senior scholars;
• Interactive sessions, such as “tutoring sessions”, aimed at giving participants the opportunity to discuss their own research ideas with senior speakers in individual or small group meetings.
What’s special about the Institute?
Attending the school means developing transversal competences because the approach is multidisciplinary, and those who have a specific economic or sociological background will know more about medical advances in ageing research, learning the specific language in which MDs deal with these issues as well.
High-level policy makers or officials who may also take part in this programme will be able to learn how to connect issues between the health dimension of ageing and the economic dimension of ageing.
Learning Outcomes
Double learning outcomes: on one hand, participants will gain more insight into the recent advances of the ageing process from a theoretical and practical point of views, and will be able to evaluate the impact of these advances (e.g. health care costs); on the other hand participants will take part into a “hands-on” session that will teach them how to use the data behind the research effort in this area. Hence participants will gain both subject-related competence in handling large data sets on ageing, which do contain relevant information on health conditions, but also economic conditions. Finally, participants will be able to develop models which can predict the relevance of policies, such as reforms in the Long Term care dimension.
Who can apply?
Graduates, PhD students and post-doc scholars in economics, statistics, social sciences and medicine, but also to professionals in the pharmaceutical and ageing care industries.
What’s the relevance of the school?
Ageing population is a major concern for many European countries. The ageing process is a complex process involving several dimensions, from the health dimension to the socio-economic context. In order to achieve a better understanding of how to guarantee successful ageing in Europe, it is crucial to take account jointly of these different dimensions, and to develop welfare models that enhance the resource aspect of an ageing population: from labour supply (experience), to family care, etc.
Future generations of researchers will have to address the challenge of ageing with a multidisciplinary background, both in their academic career and in operational activities, and policy making as well. This is true also for firms (and managers) which will have to adjust to an ageing work-force and to make the best of the skills that these workers will offer. It is clear that this research agenda has a huge impact on public finances, ranging from Health care and Long term care spending, to Pensions and Social Security.
ECTS equivalence: 2
Bios of Lead Professors
Agar Brugiavini is full professor of Economics at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She has investigated the behaviour of individuals and household both in the area of consumption and saving and in the area of labour supply. In particular, she is interested in the effects of pension reforms on household’s saving decisions, in retirement choices and in the insurance aspects of pension arrangements. More recently she has looked at the relationship between health conditions and economic behaviour.
Stefania Maggi is Senior Researcher at the National Research Council of Italy, Aging Section-Institute of Neuroscience. She holds a Degree of Doctor in Medicine and Surgery at the School of Medicine, University of Padua, Italy, a Master in Public Health - Department of Epidemiology, The Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, and a PhD in Pathophysiology School of Medicine, University of Padua, Italy. She is author of about 170 publications in peer-reviewed national and international journals.
Juergen Maurer is Director of the Institute of Economics and Management of Healthcare at the University of Lausanne. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He is a fellow of the Center for Economics and Social Research (CESR) at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, a senior fellow of the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging (MEA), an external affiliate of the Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) of the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York in the UK, an adjunct economist at the RAND Corporation and an adjunct lecturer at the Institute for Global Health of the University of Geneva. His research work mainly focuses on aging, health disparities and public health.
Giacomo Pasini is Associate Professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Department of Economics, affiliated to Netspar, director of the PhD in Economics at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Rector's delegate for Cooperation and development. His research interest mainly focus on Health and Ageing Economics; Labor Economics; Household Finance.
Guglielmo Weber is full professor of Econometrics at University of Padua. He is also International Research Associate at the IFS (London), Research Fellow at the CEPR (London), Italian Country Team Leader for SHARE and deputy managing director of SHARE-ERIC. His research interests mainly focus on consumption, savings and the economics of ageing.
Applications procedure and costs
Application via VIU website, now available
Extended deadline: April 15th 2019
Application fees:
Full fee: € 600 incl. VAT
Applicants from VIU member universities: € 200 incl. VAT
Scholarships may be available to cover part of the fee.
The fees will cover tuition, course materials, accommodation in shared rooms at the VIU campus, lunches in the VIU cafeteria and social events.
Contact and info:
Mariagiulia Bertolini
Tel: (+39) 041 2719511
Email: ageing@univiu.org
Ece Kamar is Distinguished Scientist, Corporate Vice President and the Managing Director of the AI Frontiers Lab at Microsoft Research. She leads research and development towards pushing the frontiers of AI capabilities. Releases from her lab includes Phi family of models and libraries to empower agentic work, including AutoGen, MagenticOne and MagenticUI. Ece has a decade of experience studying the impact of AI on society and developing AI systems that are reliable, unbiased and trustworthy. She has been instrumental in building the Responsible AI efforts inside Microsoft. She serves as Technical Advisor for Microsoft’s Internal Committee on AI, Engineering and Ethics. Ece received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Sabanci University in Istanbul. She completed her PhD at Harvard University, where she has worked with Prof. Barbara Grosz on human-AI collaboration. Ece is an Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington and is an Adjunct Faculty at Sabanci University. She was a member of the first study panel of Stanford’s AI100. She is currently serving on the National Academies' Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB). She has been on the organizing committees of top AI and HCI conferences and received multiple best paper awards for her work.
Luc Steels is a pioneer of artificial intelligence research in Europe. After studies and research, first in languages and literature at the university of Antwerp and then at the MIT AI Lab in the late seventies (advisor Marvin Minsky), he returned to Europe in 1983 as professor of computer science at the Free University of Brussels (VUB). He founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1983 and became its acting director until 2011. In 1996 he became founding director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. From 2011 he joined the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA) as research professor, associated with the Institute for Evolutionary Biology (IBE, UPF-CSIC) in Barcelona. From 2018 he started activities in Venice, first at Ca’Foscari University in the Department of Management and the European Center for Living Technologies, then at the Venice International University in Venice (Italy) until 2025. During all this time he was not only active as an AI researcher, but also as a prolific writer (Google scholar lists more than 400 papers more than 24,000 citations and an h-index of 74 and an i-index of 221). He also published a dozen edited volumes and monographs about knowledge-based AI, behavior-based robotics, artificial life, AI in education, evolutionary linguistics and computational music. In 2022, Steels received the EURAI Distinguished Service Award, highest distinction for AI in Europe.
Marina Calloni is Full Professor and Chair of Political and Social Philosophy at the University of Milan-Bicocca. She is a member of the Board of Directors and Director of the research center ADV – Against Domestic Violence. She holds a PhD in Philosophy and a PhD in Social and Political Sciences. In 2020, she was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic by the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella. She is President of the Italian Society of Critical Theory. She worked on the archives of the Frankfurt School and was a post-doctoral researcher with Habermas in Frankfurt, as well as one of his Italian translators. She has been a guest professor at the New School for Social Research in New York and a fellow at the Italian Academy – Columbia University. She has taught at the Universities of Notre Dame, Łódź, Frankfurt a.M., Bremen, Vienna, Lugano, Hanover, and Kurume. She was a senior researcher at the Gender Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science, directing the International Network for Research on Gender.
C. Shawn McGuffey, Ph.D., is Professor of Sociology and past Director of African & African Diaspora Studies at Boston College. A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Dr. McGuffey’s professional work primarily highlights how race, gender, sexuality and social class both constrain and create the choices survivors pursue in the aftermath of trauma in the U.S. and throughout the African Diaspora. Two of his current projects focus on sexual trauma. One examines how gender, sexuality, and race shape parental responses to child sexual abuse; and the other investigates the social psychology of sexual assault survivors in the U.S., Ghana, South Africa, and Rwanda. His most recent project examines Black and feminist geographies. 
Manfred Nowak is Secretary General of the Global Campus of Human Rights in Venice and Director of the Vienna Master of Arts in Applied Human Rights at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He previously served in various expert functions, such as UN Expert on enforced disappearances (1993-2006), UN Special Rapporteur on Torture (2004-2010), judge at the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina (1996-2003) and Vice Chairperson of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency (2013-2018). In 2016 he was appointed Independent Expert leading the UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty. He was Director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights at Utrecht University (SIM, 1987-1989) and of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights at Vienna University (BIM, 1992-2019) as well as Visiting Professor at the University of Lund (2002-2003), the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva (2008-2009), and at Stanford University in Palo Alto (2014). He is author of more than 600 publications in the fields of public international law and human rights.
Simone Borghesi is Director of the Florence School of Regulation – Climate at the European University Institute (EUI), President of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (EAERE) and Vice Rector for International Relations at the University of Siena. He has been President of the Italian Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (2018-19) and Secretary General of the Policy Outreach Committee of EAERE (2018-23). He received a M.Sc. at University College London (1996) and a Ph.D. at the European University Institute (2001). He worked at the International Monetary Fund (1998) and FEEM Milan (1999). He was visiting scholar at INRA (2013), University of Cambridge (2015), ETH Zurich (2016). He has directed several LIFE projects on Emissions Trading (SIDE, DICET, COASE) and the EUI unit in past and present Horizon projects (e.g. Innopath, Capable, Spes). 
Rika Preiser is Professor at the Centre for Sustainability Transitions (CST) at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and UNESCO Co-Chair in Complexity and Transformative African Futures. Her research weaves together philosophical inquiry, complexity science, and environmental ethics to address urgent social-ecological challenges. She focuses on relational and embodied approaches to human–nature interactions, and investigates how creative, experimental methods can support regenerative change. Her work highlights the role of critical reflection and systemic imagination in fostering meaningful sustainability transformations.
Dean, School of Environment, Tsinghua University.
Nicola Tollin is Professor with special responsibilities in Urban Resilience, Chairholder and coordinator of the UNESCO Chair on Urban Resilience at University of Southern Denmark, within the section of Civil and Architectural Engineering. 