Medical doctor, free-lance journalist and science writer, Roberta Villa has been contributing for more than 25 years to many Italian and International magazines and newspapers, such as Corriere della Sera, Le Scienze (it. edition of Scientific American) Vaccine today and Cancer World. For almost 10 years, she has been working with the communication office of the Italian Association for Cancer Research (AIRC). She is currently in the working group created by the Italian Federation of Medical Associations (FNOMCeO) to fight hoaxes and fake news and actively contributes to the related website “Dottore, ma è vero che…” (“Doctor, is it true?”).

Working with different entities, she has been in charge of communication and dissemination in 2 EU funded projects about communication and other Science-in-Society issues in infectious crises: TELL ME and ASSET. Within TELL ME project (36 months 7th FP), in addition to dissemination, she was responsible for 2 online courses addressed to healthcare workers on ebola, flu and other emerging infectious diseases and cooperated with BMJ, ISS and Haifa University to the Practical guide for Health risk communication. Within ASSET project (48m 7th FP), she was media officer and editor-in-chief of the website. She wrote the D7.1 Communication Strategy, D3.3 Action Plan Handbook and cooperated to the Final publishable Summary Report.

She took part in the “Global Initiative to Educate the Media on Hepatitis C“ launched by the World Federation of Science Journalists, and contributed to produce the online toolkit.

For Clinica Terapeutica, an indexed Italian journal, she prepared a paper on communication in Zika epidemic. She contributed to a document on the elements of an effective communication in public health, published on Human Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics.

Relevant publications:

• Villa R. Michienzi A. «Acqua sporca. Che cosa rischiamo di buttare via insieme al caso Stamina» («Dirty water: what we risk to throw away along with the Stamina case»). Book published by Editore Zadig (2014).
• Villa R. «For Media, “Women’s Health” often stands for “Beauty”». In Health and Gender. Resilience and Vulnerability Factors For Women’s Health in the Contemporary Society, edited by Tarricone I and Riecher-Rössler A. Springer ed. In press (2018).
• Villa R. «Vaccini. Il diritto di non avere paura. Tutto quello che occorre sapere sulle vaccinazioni» (Vaccines: the right not to have fear. Everything that one should know about vaccinations). Book distributed by Corriere della Sera (2017). New edition in press for Il Pensiero scientifico editore (2018).