Culture and Health - The pursuit of happiness
Institutional Communication Service
16 November 2021
The lecture series dedicated to "Culture and Health", the course of USI Faculty of Biomedical Sciences, open to the public and carried out in collaboration with the City of Lugano Arts Department and IBSA Foundation for Scientific Research continues. The fourth lecture will be held Monday, 15 November 2021 and will focus on the theme "The pursuit of happiness. Mind-body: how culture can contribute in the prevention and treatment of stress-related diseases".
The lecture will be introduced and moderated by Prof. Enzo Grossi, author of the book " Cultura e salute, la partecipazione culturale come strumento per un nuovo welfare". The guest speaker will be Antonella Delle Fave, Professor of General Psychology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Milan, who will give an introductory key-note speech to present the lecture's theme. The presentation will provide the cue for a discussion between Daniele Finzi Pasca, director, choreographer and actor, and Greta Guarda, Vice Dean of the USI Faculty of Biomedical Sciences.
The encounter will take place from 6 pm to 7:30 pm in the Lugano East Campus multipurpose room.
No registration is required to attend the course.
Please note: Access with Covid certificate (16 years and older), mask compulsory.
Lesson content
The study of happiness is the main focus of positive psychology, a movement born in the psychological sciences during the '90s from studies and research on subjective well-being. Since then, "positive psychology" has provided relevant, innovative elements in theory and application. Within this discipline, we can identify two primary perspectives: on the one hand, the hedonic perspective, in which research and studies focus on the analysis of the pleasure dimension; on the other hand, the eudaimonic perspective that focuses on the study of factors that promote the potential, personal fulfilment and development of the individual, also concerning the development of the community.
Full Professor of General Psychology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Milan. She has actively contributed to the promotion and international dissemination of positive psychology and research on well-being as president of the International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA), the European Network of Positive Psychology (ENPP) and the Italian Society of Positive Psychology (SIPP). Since 2010 he has been Editor in Chief of the Journal of Happiness Studies. www.unimi.it/it/ugov/person/antonella-dellefave
Director, choreographer and actor, he initially approached the circus world thanks to his experiences as a gymnast. Subsequently, he created and directed about twenty shows within the Sunil Theatre. He collaborated and directed shows for Cirque Éloize and Cirque du Soleil. In 2006 he was author and director of the Closing Ceremony of the XX Winter Olympic Games in Turin. In 2011 he co-founded the Finzi Pasca Company, with which he created and produced more than 35 shows. In 2014 he also authored and directed the closing ceremonies of the XXII Winter Olympic Games and the XI Winter Paralympic Games in Sochi. https://finzipasca.com/en/compagnia/team/daniele-finzi-pasca/
Greta Guarda studied Molecular Biology at the University of Zurich and performed her diploma work at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich. From 2004 to 2007, she carried out her PhD work on T cell-mediated immunity at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB), Bellinzona. In 2007, she joined as post-doctoral fellow the University of Lausanne, where she became senior lecturer in 2010. During these years, she focused her research on NOD-like receptors and inflammasome function. She established her independent research group in 2012 thanks to the award of a Swiss National Science Foundation professorship and a European Research Council starting grant. Greta Guarda joined the IRB as Group Leader in 2018 and is Associate Professor at the Università della Svizzera italiana, where she became Vice-Dean of Research in 2021. Since 2016, she is member of the Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology and since 2020 she has been elected member of the Swiss Academy of Sciences, Forum for Genetic Research. For her scientific contributions, she was awarded the Premio Fondazione Dr. Ettore Balli 2018, the Pfizer Research Prize 2019, and the Friedrich Miescher Award 2020. https://search.usi.ch/en/people/9def1e85c161016f8ab9f4a4f47b0bb4/guarda-greta
