Ines Testoni

Full Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Padua, she has directed the Master's Program in Death Studies & The End of Life since 2007 and the Master's Program in Creative Arts Therapies for Resilience Support since 2022. She teaches, among other subjects, Psychology of End-of-Life Relationships, Loss, and Death and Dynamic Psychology of Grief and Palliative Care. A psychologist and psychotherapist, she also trained in philosophy alongside Emanuele Severino, whose international series she edits for Bloomsbury. She is a research fellow at the University of Haifa and has been president of the Association for Studies on Spirituality, Eternity, and Death (ASSEM) since 2026.

Her research focuses on palliative psychology and death education: representations of death and Terror Management Theory, grief processing (including perinatal and traumatic grief, or delegitimized grief such as that for the loss of pets), suicide prevention, and the moral distress of healthcare professionals. In the field of end-of-life care, she explores self-determination, advance directives, shared care planning, and physician-assisted suicide. More recently, she has studied the relationship between grief and artificial intelligence. She also works on gender-based violence and on art therapy and psychodrama in healthcare and prison settings.

He directed and coordinated the European projects EMPoWER (Daphne III), Death Education for Palliative Psychology: DE4PP (and Erasmus+), and is a partner in the Stand by Palliative and Elderly Caregivers: SPES4Caregivers project (Erasmus+).

She is a member of the working groups on end-of-life and palliative care of the National Council of the Order of Psychologists. She co-directs the journals Eternity and Contradiction and Gli Argonauti. She is the author of approximately 250 scientific articles of international impact, over 20 edited volumes, and 15 monographs.