Dr. Giulia Sinatti is a social scientist and Assistant Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work combines research-led, people-centred approaches with a commitment to innovation across different fields, including health, international development, and migration.

Giulia’s core interest lies in how diverse actors collaborate and negotiate meaning around shared challenges. She draws on qualitative methods, particularly ethnography, to study how collaborations unfold in real-world settings, offering insights that complement and challenge conventional approaches. By observing people in their everyday professional environments, her work explores how definitions, values, and responsibilities are shaped in relation to health, illness, care, and cure.

Her current research focuses on Africa–Europe collaborations in biomedical HIV cure research, logics of care in childbirth, and the boundary-work of interdisciplinary healthcare teams. Beyond health, she has conducted extensive research on migration governance and on initiatives that seek to involve migrants in development and humanitarian action. Across these intersecting and mutually enriching domains, she investigates how knowledge is co-produced and how partnerships can be made more equitable and effective.

Giulia is more than a scholar of collaboration, she is also an active participant in it. She works closely with colleagues across academic disciplines and professional sectors, using ethnography not only as a method but also as a critical lens, to ask unexpected questions, foster reflection, and situate everyday practices within their broader institutional and social contexts.

Before joining academia, Giulia worked as an international development practitioner in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. She has held earlier academic positions in Italy (Milan-Bicocca), Senegal (IFAN), the UK (LSE, Goldsmiths), and the Netherlands (Erasmus-ISS).