I am Michele Fusaroli, a PhD student at the University of Bologna with a background in Medicine. My research focus is on understanding the safety of drugs in relation to neuropsychiatric and psychosocial phenomena. Specifically, my PhD project is investigating behavioral addictions caused by drugs, such as pathological gambling and compulsive shopping, which may be induced by dopamine agonists in Parkinson's Disease.

To gain insight into questions that have yet to be answered by other forms of evidence, I am interested in using existing methods from other fields to analyze spontaneous reports of adverse drug reactions. This includes refining techniques to combine pharmacovigilance and pharmacometrics data to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying impulsivity, utilizing information from spontaneous reports to estimate the dose lethality of drugs used in suicide attempts, and implementing network analysis to understand the complexity of real-world data such as polytherapy and the co-occurring of multiple social adverse drug reactions as iatrogenic syndromes.

In February, I will be joining the IMC and taking advantage of its interdisciplinary approach. I’ll be working with Roberta Rocca on applying natural language processing to get information from spontaneous reports and the literature. I will only be there for a month, but if anyone is interested, I would love to have a casual conversation or grab a cup of coffee.