Giovanni Spitale

Giovanni Spitale, PhD

Postdoc; Co-director@ITE Lab

Giovanni Spitale is a postdoctoral fellow at the IBME, and since 2025 the co-director of ITE Lab.

He has a strong inclination for empirical ethics and citizen science/participatory research; thematically, his research interests revolve around the ethics of emerging technologies, disinformation and infodemic management, ethics of risk and crisis communication, and public health ethics. In terms of methods, he likes to dip in multiple bowls, combining natural language processing, computational linguistics, qualitative research, statistics, and philosophical analysis into mixed methods approaches. AI, something with which Giovanni is playing a lot, can fit both in the ‘themes’ and in the ‘methods’ box.

He has served as a rapporteur for the World Health Organization panel on ethical considerations in social listening and infodemic management. In 2025 he has been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Medical Ethics, University of Oslo. He is also a member of the Digital Society Initiative Health (DSI Health) and is currently coordinating different projects aligned with his research interests. He has published his research on journals like Science Advances, NEJM Catalyst, the American Journal of Bioethics, and JMIR. His work has garnered media attention, featured in outlets like The Times, The Verge, Wired, El Pais, MIT Technology Review, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Der Standard, SwissInfo. He has been a TEDx Speaker.

Giovanni Spitale has a background in philosophy and holds a PhD in medical sciences. His PhD dissertation tackled the complex ethical dilemmas brought to the fore by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Research interests

Empirical ethics, public health ethics, information & data ethics, infodemic management, ethics of emerging technologies, AI ethics, open science & research integrity, risk & crisis communication ethics, participatory governance & co-production, preference epidemiology, data governance & infrastructures, algorithmic accountability & auditing, end-of-life ethics, procedural ethics & procedural pluralism, epistemic humility, civic epistemology, value-ladenness of evidence & philosophy of science, conceptual engineering of normative tools.

Ongoing projects

Publications

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6812-0979

Zenodo repository

ZORA Publication List

Publications

2025
- Journal Article
  - Spitale, Giovanni; Germani, Federico; Earp, Brian D; Mann, Sebastian Porsdam; Barış, Maide; Annoni, Marco; Aramesh, Kiarash; Lederman, Zohar; Ho, Calvin W L; Caals, Karel; D'Imperio, Ambra; Ienca, Marcello; Singh, Shenuka; Spagnolo, Debora; Biller‐Andorno, Nikola (2025). On Religious Influence in Bioethics: The Limits of Pluriversalism. Bioethics, 39(6):620-629.
  - Spagnolo, Debora; Spitale, Giovanni (2025). A Mixed-methods Study of Deep Brain Stimulation's Temporal Impact on Parkinson’s Disease Patients: Insights from Short-, Medium-, and Long-term Experiences. Neuroethics, 18(2):29.
  - Germani, Federico; Spitale, Giovanni; Biller-Andorno, Nikola (2025). S.A.R.A.H. and the decline of trust in health information: a case study. Health Policy and Technology, 14(3):101032.
  - Redaelli, Simone; Biller-Andorno, Nikola; Gloeckler, Sophie; Brown, Jessica; Spitale, Giovanni; Germani, Federico (2025). Mastering critical thinking skills is strongly associated with the ability to recognize fakeness and misinformation. Frontiers in Education, 10:1577692.
  - Spitale, Giovanni; Germani, Federico; Biller-Andorno, Nikola (2025). Introducing Preference Epidemiology: Improving Patient-Centered Approaches in Health Decision-Making. International Journal of Public Health, 70:1608617.
  - Vinay, Rasita; Spitale, Giovanni; Biller-Andorno, Nikola; Germani, Federico (2025). Emotional prompting amplifies disinformation generation in AI large language models. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 8:1543603.
2024
- Journal Article
  - Spitale, Giovanni; Biller-Andorno, Nikola; Germani, Federico; Merten, Sonja (2024). Digital Democracy and Emergency Preparedness: Engaging the Public in Public Health. International Journal of Public Health, 69:1608004.
  - Germani, Federico; Spitale, Giovanni; Biller-Andorno, Nikola (2024). The Dual Nature of AI in Information Dissemination: Ethical Considerations. JMIR AI, 3:e53505.
  - Kaiser-Grolimund, Andrea; Schwind, Bettina Friederike; Kämpfen, Laura; Morgan, Anna Lea; Spitale, Giovanni; Biller-Andorno, Nikola; Merten, Sonja (2024). Soliciting Diaries for “Real-Time” Insights Into the COVID-19 Pandemic: Methodological Reflections on Using Digital Technologies to Engage the Public. International Journal of Public Health, 69:1606912.
  - Spitale, Giovanni; Germani, Federico; Biller-Andorno, Nikola (2024). TopicTracker – An advanced software pipeline for text mining on PubMed data: Bridging the gap between off-the-shelf tools and code based approaches. Heliyon, 10(17):e36351.
  - Germani, Federico; Spitale, Giovanni; Machiri, Sandra Varaidzo; Ho, Calvin Wai Loon; Ballalai, Isabella; Biller-Andorno, Nikola; Reis, Andreas Alois (2024). Ethical Considerations in Infodemic Management: Systematic Scoping Review. JMIR Infodemiology, 4:e56307.
  - Spitale, Giovanni; Germani, Federico; Biller-Andorno, Nikola (2024). Disruptive Technologies and Open Science: How Open Should Open Science Be? A ‘Third Bioethics’ Ethical Framework. Science and Engineering Ethics, 30(4):36.
  - Ziebland, Sue; Sakuma-Sato, Rika; Grob, Rachel; Dowrick, Anna; Navarro Dias de Souza, Alicia Regina; Spitale, Giovanni; Schlesinger, Mark (2024). Cross country analysis of qualitative interviews: Developing a method, a community and an understanding of how Covid has been experienced around the globe. SSM : Qualitative Research in Health, 5:100396.
  - Germani, Federico; Spitale, Giovanni; Biller-Andorno, Nikola (2024). Beyond Trade-Offs: Autonomy, Effectiveness, Fairness, and Normativity in Risk and Crisis Communication. The American Journal of Bioethics, 24(6):W2-W5.
  - Spitale, Giovanni; Germani, Federico; Biller-Andorno, Nikola (2024). The PHERCC Matrix. An Ethical Framework for Planning, Governing, and Evaluating Risk and Crisis Communication in the Context of Public Health Emergencies. The American Journal of Bioethics, 24(4):67-82.
2023
- Journal Article
  - Spitale, Giovanni; Schneider, Gerold; Germani, Federico; Biller-Andorno, Nikola (2023). Exploring the role of AI in classifying, analyzing, and generating case reports on assisted suicide cases: feasibility and ethical implications. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 6:1328865.
  - Fang, Mirriam Tyebally; Germani, Federico; Spitale, Giovanni; Wäscher, Sebastian; Kunz, Ladina; Biller-Andorno, Nikola (2023). Women’s experiences with non-invasive prenatal testing in Switzerland: a qualitative analysis. BMC Medical Ethics, 24(1):85.
  - Spitale, Giovanni; Biller-Andorno, Nikola; Germani, Federico (2023). AI model GPT-3 (dis)informs us better than humans. Science Advances, 9(26):eadh1850.
  - Spitale, Giovanni; Glässel, Andrea; Tyebally-Fang, Mirriam; Mouton Dorey, Corine; Biller-Andorno, Nikola (2023). Patient narratives – a still undervalued resource for healthcare improvement. Swiss Medical Weekly, 153:40022.
2022
- Journal Article
  - Biller-Andorno, Nikola; Spitale, Giovanni (2022). Addressing Volatile Ethical Issues of Covid-19 with the Core Five Enduring Values List for Health Care Professionals. NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery:online.

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