Gian Maria Campedelli honored with the 2024 Early Career Award

Gian Maria Campedelli, criminologist and researcher at FBK’s MobS unit, has received the 2024 Early Career Award from the European Society of Criminology (ESC), Europe’s leading scientific society dedicated to the study of crime and criminal behavior. The award, given during the ESC’s annual conference held on September 11, 2024 in Bucharest, recognizes his outstanding scientific contribution just four years after receiving his PhD.

The Early Career Award

The prize jury was unanimous in its decision to award Gian Maria Campedelli the 2024 “Early Career Award“ for his outstanding empirical and conceptual contributions to the discipline. The award is dedicated to young researchers who have distinguished themselves for the quality and impact of their scientific production no more than ten years after completing their doctoral studies.

In the reasons expressed, the jury emphasized how Campedelli’s work is at the forefront of combining statistical and computational approaches to advance the analysis of various crime phenomena – ranging from organized crime to homicide, urban crime, terrorism-and how such approaches often have practical spin-offs in terms of evaluating public policies to prevent and combat crime.

“This award is the result of a vision that received little support and much criticism at the beginning of my doctoral journey: to do criminological research by crossing disciplinary boundaries that cage creative, empirical, intellectual thinking.  So I am honored for this prestigious award and happy that the jury has recognized today how contamination and dialogue between different scientific worlds can truly contribute to advancing our understanding of the society of which we are a part. I want to share this achievement with all the wonderful criminologist, economist, computer scientist, statistician, and physicist colleagues with whom I have worked and engaged with over the years: without this diversity it would have all been a boring monologue,” Gian Maria Campedelli said.

Educational and professional background

Gian Maria Campedelli is a research scientist with MobS Lab, the Mobile and Social Computing Lab at Fondazione Bruno Kessler’s Center for Augmented Intelligence, where he works on criminology and cooperative artificial intelligence.

Campedelli’s educational background reflects his interdisciplinary approach to the study of criminal behavior: after earning his doctorate in criminology from the Catholic University of Milan in 2020 while working as a research scientist at Transcrime and a visiting research scholar experience at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, he did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento, funded by the MIUR initiative for Departments of Excellence.

He published in 2022 a monograph entitled “Machine Learning for Criminology and Crime Research: At the Crossroads,” which examines the intersection of machine learning, artificial intelligence and research on crime, analyzing the historical origins and reflecting on the possible future prospects of this area of research.

Campedelli has also authored numerous articles in the most prestigious journals in the field such as Criminology, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, British Journal of Criminology and Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. His research has also been published in high-profile generalist journals such as Nature and Human Behaviour and Science.

In 2023, he co-authored a study published in Science that estimated the size of the population affiliated with Mexican cartels by simulating the effects of policies to reduce violence in the Central American country. The research found that reducing recruitment into cartels is the most effective intervention for decreasing homicides and affiliated members. As Campedelli recounted in an interview in FBK Magazine, some of the study’s methods and findings are also relevant to contexts such as Italy, particularly in the fight against mafia and transnational crime.