Francesco De Toni

Francesco De Toni is a Researcher and Adjunct Research Fellow at the School of Allied Health within the Health Professions Education department at The University of Western Australia (UWA). He holds affiliations with the Australian National University’s Institute for Communication in Healthcare and the Western Australian Department of Health. His research focuses on pragmatics, language and emotion, computational linguistics, and historical linguistics. He leads projects like HEAL'D (Health Emotions in Australia) and contributed to the international BigScience initiative, developing multilingual AI models. He also works on voice-to-text digital scribes for clinical documentation.

Education: PhD in Historical Linguistics from UWA (2019), MA and BA from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (2013, 2011). Awards include a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship (2020) and multiple scholarships recognizing his work in language and emotion studies.

• Key Projects:
  • HEAL'D: Improving emotional communication in healthcare
  • BLOOM: 176B-parameter multilingual AI model
  • BigScience: Open-source NLP research collaboration
• Teaching: Courses in Italian Studies, Linguistics, and Narrative Medicine at UWA.
• Languages: Fluent in English, Italian, French, Spanish, German, Hindi; reads Latin.

Research highlights include analyzing emotional expression in Italian over centuries, studying friendship networks via colonial letters, and leveraging computational methods for health communication improvement.