Luca Menghini

I am a work and organizational psychologist, and I got my PhD in applied psychophysiology at the University of Padova, with a project on work stress assessment through wearable and mobile technologies. Since I was a student, I have been mainly interested in how psychology can be applied to improve working conditions and promote worker health and well-being. Then, I got passionate about peripheral psychophysiology to monitor (through psychophysiological assessment) and manage stress at work (through biofeedback training), particularly focusing on heart rate variability. During my PhD, I had the opportunity to spend a visiting period at SRI International (Menlo Park, California, USA), where I deepened my knowledge of the connections between stress and sleep, and I have started working on the validity and use of wearable sleep trackers. Ambulatory methods (e.g., ecological momentary assessment, experience sampling methods) strongly characterize my studies, with a particular focus on temporal fluctuations in stressful exposures and the consequent affective, psychophysiological, and behavioral reactions. More recently, I spent a postdoctoral research period at the University of Bologna, where I have started studying workaholism, investigating how traits and states of work addiction can impair worker health and well-being (e.g., blood pressure, burnout). Finally, I have worked at the University of Trento on a project focused on career transitions among young workers. I am passionate about methodology and data analysis, particularly about multilevel and multivariate analyses, which I had the opportunity to teach at the University of Padova. I am a proud member of the Picostat interdisciplinary research group, which aims to promote the connection between psychology and statistics to improve the progress of psychological science. At the Human Inspired Technology Centre of the University of Padova, I am currently working on occupational health psychology, particularly on work-life balance and its connection with worker mental health. I love jazz, funky, and reggae-dub music, and during my leisure time, I delight in playing bass guitar and saxophone!