Research and projects

Cecilia Lindenberg holds a Master’s degree in International Cooperation and Development from ASERI (School of Specialisation in Economics and International Relations) in Milan. She has 13 years of experience as a project officer involved in many Italian and European/international projects with different tasks – depending on the case – such as project drafting support, project management assistant, planning and coordination of activities, monitoring, helpdesk activities, facilitation and training and organisation of

Cecilia combines the research/project work with a field work as a social worker since 2016, working with asylum seekers, victims of human trafficking and homeless people

Giulia Mezzetti is researcher and project officer at the ISMU Foundation, which she joined in 2014. She takes part in the coordination and implementation of national and international research projects and consultancy activites. At ISMU, she has been involved in the EU-funded “KING – Knowledge for INtegration Governance” project and in a team research on radicalization processes and jihadism in Italy, conducting both desk and field research on the Italian case.

She is also PhD Candidate in Sociology at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan – her research interests concern integration processes, second generations, religion and Islam. She previously worked at UNESCO, Paris, and at Politeia, a research centre on applied and public ethics, where she carried research on issues of global justice, migrations and brain drain. She holds a Master’s degree in International Affairs from Sciences Po – Paris, where she specialized in migration studies and wrote a thesis on conflicts over mosques in Italy under the supervision of Prof. Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Philosophy from the University of Milan (summa cum laude).

Veronica Riniolo is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan.

Since 2008 she has been collaborating with ISMU Foundation, where she has participated in and/or coordinated activities of research groups characterized by collaborations at national and nternational levels on the following topics: processes of integration of migrants, migration policies, ethnic-racial discrimination, processes of socio-economical inclusion of Rom and Sinti people.

She is a member of the Scientific Board of the Methodology Section at AIS (Italian Association of Sociology) (2019-2011) and she is a referee for many Italian scientific journals.

Her main research interests and her scientific production concern mainly three branches: 1) Activism and political involvement of second-generation youth in Italy; 2) Policies and processes of immigrant integration in Italy and Europe, with a particular focus on the Swedish case; 3) Socio-economical inclusion of Roma in the Italian context.

Paola Pologruto obtained her Master Degree in Politics and specialized in sociological studies at University of Milan La Statale. She has carried out studies in planning and management of policies and social services within multicultural contexts at the University of Milan Bicocca.

Since 2008, in collaboration with Ismu Foundation she has been focussing on project design, research and training activities related to migration processes, integration, prevention and fight against ethnic and racial discriminations.

Luca Merotta is Project Manager at Fondazione ISMU. He is in charge of implementing European projects and monitoring EU policies and programmes. He is also coordinator of the “Europe, Africa and migration” programme on migration and development.

Luca holds a B.A. in Linguistic Science and International Relations from the Catholic University of Milan, a M.A. in European Studies from Leiden University and a M.A. in Transnational Politics from the University of Paris 8 – Vincennes-Saint-Denis. Previously he worked for the European Commission, the European network of children’s right organisations Eurochild and the French Development Agency. He joined Fondazione ISMU in 2016.