The researcher who likes to be a manager

FOR PAOLO PINOTTI, NEW DEAN OF THE FACULTY, RESEARCH AND MANAGERIAL ROLES ARE NOT NECESSARILY IN CONTRAST. INDEED, THEY ALLOW YOU TO ENRICH AND COMPLEMENT YOUR EXPERIENCE

At the beginning of his career he could never imagine that in the future he would be called to fill institutional roles. Now that he has spent a few years doing so, he considers it almost a duty of responsibility and, more generally, an experience that he recommends. Paolo Pinotti, Full Professor at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, has recently taken the post of Dean of the Faculty but has already fill managerial roles as director of the CLEAN research lab and coordinator of the Rodolfo Debenedetti Foundation. “I love doing research, but at a certain point it's also nice to vary, to look for other challenges. Bocconi has also been facing a great change, opening up to whole new disciplinary areas. And it is stimulating to talk with faculty members from such a wide array of different disciplines”. Research and academic career were not on his mind as a child. For him, enrolling at Bocconi was more a way of keeping options open and postpone the decision on what to do "when you grow up". "The change came when I prepared my degree thesis with Guido Tabellini. The topic was privatizations and there I realized that research really interested me".

His first job was at the Bank of Italy, then during a seminar at the University the encounter with Francesco Billari, who gave him the idea of ​​returning to Bocconi, 10 years after graduation. "The issue of immigration is one that has always fascinated me", he says, "but not only that, the economic consequences of organized crime and corruption are also issues which I have explored. And I will continue to do so, even if my new position will absorb a lot of energy”. Among his tasks, some are very sensitive: "The main responsibility concerns the hiring of new professors", he says, "and reconcile as much as possible their needs with those of our Departments. But I will also take care of academic career advancement, promoting growth paths consistent with the standards of teaching and research excellence to which we aspire as a university. Last but not least, I will collaborate with our Human Resources Department in the drafting of internal regulations that incorporate the ministerial reforms and apply them to the context of our university”. The Bocconi where he now works in is very different from the one he knew as a student: "When I graduated, at the beginning of the 2000s, it was a purely Italian university in terms of degree programs, faculty, and students. When I returned ten years later, it had become one of the top universities in Europe. An epochal change".

by Davide Ripamonti
Translated by Alex Foti