Valentina Bambini - Biography#
Valentina Bambini obtained an MA in Humanities from the University of Pisa (2001) and received her academic training in linguistics at Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, where she obtained both her Diploma (2002) and PhD (2007) with highest distinction. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Scuola Normale Superiore (2008 - 2010), she held a non-tenured Assistant Professorship at the same institution (2010 - 2011). In 2011, she joined the University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia, where she progressed from tenure-track Assistant Professor (2011 - 2014) to Associate Professor (2014 - 2022), and was appointed Full Professor of Linguistics in 2022.
She has published extensively on neuropragmatics, brain basis of metaphor understanding, pragmatic disorders in psychiatric and neurological conditions, and developmental pragmatics, with over 100 peer-reviewed articles and chapters in international journals or volumes (including Cognition, Brain and Language, Neuropsychologia, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B ) and an h-index of 35 (GoogleScholar) and 31 (Scopus). She delivered more than 60 keynote or invited lectures worldwide. She taught pragmatics and neurolinguistics as an Adjunct or Visiting Professor in Milan, Pisa, Verona, Zurich, Trondheim, Berlin.
Her scientific leadership is evidenced also by continuous success in competitive funding as Principal Investigator, including an ERC Consolidator Grant (PROMENADE, 2023 - 2027) and an ERC Proof of Concept Grant (Meta4Kids 2026 - 2027), alongside other projects funded by national (Italian Ministry of Education and Research, Italian Ministry of Health) and international bodies (Velux Foundation, Wellcome). The total amount of funding she has been involved in exceeds € 10 million. Thanks to this, she evolved from coordinating a research group of 4 people in 2017 to establishing the Laboratory of Neurolinguistics and Experimental Pragmatics in 2023 (NEPLab; https://www.neplab.it
), which currently includes 20 people. Since 2009, Prof. Bambini has supervised 10 PhD students and five postdoctoral fellows, with 8 former trainees now holding academic or clinical positions, and is currently supervising 10 PhD students. She served as Action Editor for the Language Section at Neuropsychologia, and sits on the editorial boards of Intercultural Pragmatics, Language and Health, and Journal of Experimental Pragmatics, in addition to several Italian journals in linguistics and cognitive science.
Alongside her academic appointment, Prof. Bambini has assumed extensive institutional responsibilities at IUSS Pavia, serving as Vice Rector for PhD Courses and President of the Doctoral School, as well as Coordinator of the PhD Program in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. She has been an elected member of the Academic Senate since 2015 and is a long-standing member of the Ethics Committee of the University of Pavia.
