The University of Padua elects a female rector for the first time in its 800-year-old history. Daniela Mapelli will start her six-year tenure on 1st October 2021.
Daniela Mapelli is a 1991 University of Padua graduate in Experimental Psychology who obtained her PhD in Experimental Psychology in 1996 at the University of Trieste. She is also a member of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, the Herbert Simon Society, the Italian Association of Psychology, and the Italian Society of Neuropsychology.
Furthermore, Mapelli has published hundreds of scientific articles with more than 2629 citations and an H-index of 25.
Always going to be a woman
The election for the new rector was between two women; so the outcome was always going to make news. Elected with 1381,50 votes, Mapelli surpassed her fellow candidate Patrizia Marzaro who received 1186,62 votes.
The new Rector, succeeding current Rector Rosario Rizzuto, will begin her term October 1, 2021, the start of the new academic year. This is in time for the university’s 800-year anniversary in 2022.
Making reference to the rows of portraits of past rectors, Mapelli said: “From next October we will finally be able to say ‘men and women who led the University of Padua.'”
Hot on the heels of Rome
Mapelli’s appointment comes less than a year after Rome’s Sapienza University appointed Antonella Polimeni. Polimeni is Sapienza’s first woman rector since Pope Boniface VIII founded the university in 1303.
Padua is the second-oldest university in Italy, after Bologna, and the fifth-oldest surviving university in the world.
History of the University of Padua
In 1678, Elena Lucrezia Corner Piscopia became the first woman to graduate there, with a degree in philosophy.
She followed Copernicus and Galileo who also studied there.
The University of Padua was the result of a group of students and teachers who left Bologna in 1222. They set up a free body of scholars, grouped according to their place of origin into nations. Students approved statutes, elected the rettore (rector, or chancellor) and chose their teachers.
The university’s motto – Universa Universis Patavina Libertas – stands for defending freedom of thought in study and teaching.
