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/0000-0002-6812-0979ZORA Publication List
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Publications
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2023
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Journal Article
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Patient narratives – a still undervalued resource for healthcare improvement Swiss Medical Weekly, 153:40022.
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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.
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2022
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Journal Article
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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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Privacy, Data Sharing, and Data Security Policies of Women’s mHealth Apps: Scoping Review and Content Analysis JMIR mHealth and uHealth, 10(5):e33735.
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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.
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Dissertation
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Ethical Dilemmas in the Time of COVID-19: mapping, understanding, building systemic resilience 2022, University of Zurich, Medizinische Fakultät.
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2021
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Journal Article
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2020
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Journal Article
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COVID-19 and the ethics of quarantine: a lesson from the Eyam plague Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 23(4):603-609.
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Pagination
Varia
Scientific Coordinator of Academia Engelberg 2019
Active memberships in scientific societies
- Digital Society Initiative, UZH;
- Citizen Science Centre Zurich