Prof. Tommaso Wayne Bertolotti

About Prof. Tommaso Wayne Bertolotti

Tommaso Wayne Bertolotti was born in 1987 in Pavia (Italy) from Italian father and French-American mother.From a young age age, he began to travel the world with his family. This fostered his passion for interacting with other cultures and other traditions.As a brilliant student in high school, he developed a particular interest in philosophy and Bible studies: the first passion lead him to university, where he started his career in philosophy in 2005. He acquired his bachelor ‘s degree in 2008 with a memoir on the cognitive and pragmatic analysis of gossip, then in 2010 his master studies concerned the cognitive science of religion.During his PhD at the University of Pavia, under the direction of Lorenzo Magnani, he tackled a number of study subjects ranging from philosophy of science to that of religion, and he dedicated much of his effort to gossip, also connecting it to social issues such as the reliance on social networks and cyber-bullying.His research did not go unnoticed: in 2012 he was invited to a working group at the Joint Research Center of the European Commission (JRC) in Ispra, Italy. After that, he began his intellectual partnership with Microsoft, for which he was invited to many conferences on online security, in Paris and Brussels, over the following years. His research has resulted in several peer-reviewed articles and in the book “Patterns of Rationality: Recurring Inferences in Science, Social Cognition and Religious Thinking” (Springer, 2015).Currently, he has completed his post-doc at the University of Pavia, and he continues teaching and collaborating to research projects at the ParisTech, concerning autonomous cars and the respect for private data in the connected home.