Role
Full Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Padua
Bio
She graduated in Psychology in 2002 from the University of Padua and earned her PhD in 2006 from the same university, completing study periods abroad at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and the University of Ghent. She has been a researcher since 2008 and has been a visiting researcher at the Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve and Goldsmiths, University of London. She teaches courses in the psychology of disabilities and specific learning disabilities and specializes in neurodevelopmental disorders. In 2013, she was a founding member of the spin-off Lab.DA and in 2025 she founded the Neurodevelopment Center -NE(e)DS srl; since 2014, she has directed the Master's program in Developmental Disorders and Psychopathologies at the University of Padua.
Her research focuses on neurodevelopmental disorders, with a particular interest in nonverbal developmental disorders (Visuospatial Developmental Disorder), focusing on identifying its unique characteristics and differences from other developmental conditions such as autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). She has explored the role of cognitive processes and visuospatial working memory in learning disabilities, also conducting research in collaboration with the University of Cambridge on the emergence of math anxiety in school-age children. Since 2017, she has participated in the international consensus conference promoted by Columbia University for the recognition of nonverbal developmental disorders in the DSM-5.
She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology and a member of the Editorial Board of specialist journals such as Educational Psychology and Learning and Individual Differences . She has authored numerous publications and clinical assessment tools. She is a member of the AIRIPA board of directors, and since 2017, she has been part of the panel for the guidelines on DSA of the Italian Dyslexia Association, coordinating, as Chair, parts of the ISS Guideline on DSA approved in 2022.