AI, precision medicine and cryptography among the Bocconi winners of TEF’s Postdoc call
New methods for making complex technological systems explainable, wealth models that take biodiversity into account, Artificial Intelligence applied to precision medicine, language and voice as a window into human thought, homomorphic encryption for secure machine learning. These are some of the topics at the heart of the six Bocconi projects selected as part of the Tech Europe Foundation (TEF) Postdoc Fellowship – Fall 2025, the program that supports advanced research in the fields of technological innovation, Artificial Intelligence and life sciences.
The TEF Postdoc call
The Tech Europe Foundation, which promotes collaboration between universities and businesses to accelerate applied research and technology transfer, supports projects in priority areas such as new energies and materials, applied Artificial Intelligence, robotics, microelectronics, agritech, and medtech, through the TEF Postdoc call for proposals.
The TEF Postdoc call for proposals funds two-year research contracts for young postdoctoral researchers, with an annual contribution of €80,000 for each project.
Each selected project corresponds to a postdoc position, which will be activated through a public call for applications in the coming weeks. The goal is to provide emerging researchers with the conditions to embark on an independent and international career path, combining scientific rigor, concrete impact, and potential for innovation and entrepreneurship at the end.
The six Bocconi projects selected
“The quality and variety of the selected projects testify to the ability of our researchers to go beyond disciplinary boundaries, combining scientific method and vision. This is how Bocconi contributes to building knowledge that is useful to society and responsible innovation,” comments Elena Carletti, Dean for Research at Bocconi.
At Bocconi, the winning projects reflect the variety and depth of research strands that connect economics, decision sciences, and computer science:
· Emanuele Borgonovo (Department of Decision Sciences): Explainable Computer Experiments: New Methods for the Risk Assessment of Complex Technological Systems. New methodologies to make computational models that support decisions in complex and high-risk technological areas interpretable.
· Valentina Bosetti (Department of Economics): Biodiversity-Adjusted Wealth Accounting Using High-Resolution AI-Derived Biodiversity Data. A new approach to measuring wealth that integrates high-resolution environmental data, estimated using Artificial Intelligence, to include natural capital and biodiversity.
· Francesca Buffa (Department of Computing Sciences): Context-Aware Biological Knowledge for Scalable AI Reasoning in Precision Medicine (BioCore). Artificial Intelligence systems capable of reasoning in a “biologically aware” way to improve precision medicine and the understanding of omic data.
· Dirk Hovy (Department of Computing Sciences): SALMON – Social Awareness for better Large Language Model Learning. A project that aims to integrate social awareness into large-scale language models to make them more equitable, representative, and accountable.
· Debora Nozza (Department of Computing Sciences): TOLD – Thinking Out Loud: A Speech-Based Data Collection Framework. A platform for collecting and analyzing speech data, studying how spoken language reflects cognitive processes and emotions.
· Emanuela Orsini (Department of Computing Sciences): SwitchFHE: Threshold FHE and Scheme Switching for Private ML. New homomorphic encryption solutions for secure and privacy-friendly machine learning.
Towards the next call
“The TEF program was created to offer young researchers the conditions to develop high-impact projects and to strengthen the link between academic research and the industrial world,” underlines Alberto Grando, Vice President of the Tech Europe Foundation.
A new call will be launched in 2026, with the aim of further expanding the community of researchers working on the major issues of the future.