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

2022
- Journal Article
  - Alfawzan, Najd; Christen, Markus; Spitale, Giovanni; Biller-Andorno, Nikola (2022). Privacy, Data Sharing, and Data Security Policies of Women’s mHealth Apps: Scoping Review and Content Analysis. JMIR mHealth and uHealth, 10(5):e33735.
  - Spitale, Giovanni; Biller-Andorno, Nikola; Germani, Federico (2022). Concerns Around Opposition to the Green Pass in Italy: Social Listening Analysis by Using a Mixed Methods Approach. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 24(2):e34385.
- Dissertation
  - Spitale, Giovanni. Ethical Dilemmas in the Time of COVID-19: mapping, understanding, building systemic resilience. 2022, University of Zurich, Medizinische Fakultät.
2021
- Journal Article
  - Spitale, Giovanni; Merten, Sonja; Jafflin, Kristen; Schwind, Bettina; Kaiser-Grolimund, Andrea; Biller-Andorno, Nikola (2021). PubliCo. A protocol for a new risk and crisis communication platform to bridge the gap between policy makers and the public in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. JMIR research protocols, 10(11):e33653.
2020
- Journal Article
  - Spitale, Giovanni (2020). COVID-19 and the ethics of quarantine: a lesson from the Eyam plague. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 23(4):603-609.
  - Spitale, Giovanni (2020). Making sense in the flood. How to cope with the massive flow of digital information in medical ethics. Heliyon, 6(7):e04426.

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