Giulia De Togni

Giulia De Togni, Ph.D., serves as a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Biomedicine, Self, and Society within the Usher Institute of Edinburgh Medical School, University of Edinburgh. Since January 2022, she has led a 3-year Wellcome-funded project as Principal Investigator examining social robotics in Japanese and UK care contexts through 14 months of cross-cultural fieldwork, bridging medical anthropology, sociology, and Science and Technology Studies.

Her research integrates critical perspectives on technology and care, spanning robot-ethics, emotional intelligence in AI systems, elderly independence models, disaster anthropology, and biopolitical analyses of neoliberal risk frameworks. Specializing in Japanese Studies and qualitative methodologies, her work interrogates how cultural values shape human-robot interactions in healthcare while addressing gender dynamics, human rights, and environmental justice within polluted landscapes.

Key recognitions include:

• Wellcome Trust project "AI and Health" appointment (2019)
• Competitive Wellcome Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Humanities and Social Science (2022)

As Principal Investigator, she directs longitudinal ethnographic research tracing robotics innovation from laboratories to end-users, analyzing how technological implementations reshape care ethics across cultural contexts. No student supervision roles are documented in source materials. Her work operates within the Centre for Biomedicine, Self, and Society—a hub for interdisciplinary scholarship on biomedical governance, identity, and social transformation—where she contributes to theoretical advances in medical anthropology through CASTAC Blog publications and cross-institutional collaborations.