Mauro joined PoLIS as a Lecturer in International Relations & Politics in September 2022. He holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of St Andrews and the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence where he investigated the processes of strategic innovation in terrorist organisations seeking to understand the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the changes in the strategies that terrorists adopt.

He is currently working on a book on anti-technology extremism which is due in 2024. His research interests include political violence and terrorism, innovation processes in violent non-state actors, the relationship between technology and terrorists’ decision-making, and insurrectionary anarchism and left-wing extremism. His works have been published in Terrorism and Political Violence.

He was previously a Research Associate at the Center for Global Security Researched at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a Research Assistant at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt and holds an M.A. in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and an M.A. in Peace and Conflict Studies from the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. Mauro is fluent in English, German, and Italian and conversational in Spanish.