Starting from September 2016, he has been an Associate Professor of Psychology of Communication (International Telematic University UNINETTUNO, Rome). From 2000 to 2004, he was a Professor of Educational Technologies at University of L'Aquila Faculty of Educational Science.
From 1998 to 2002, he was a member of the Center of Computational Ecology (Yale University), and since 2001 he has been an affiliate of the New England Complex Systems Institute (Cambridge, MA). In 1997 he spent one sabbatical year as post-doctoral fellow at Yale University Department of Biology (Gunter Wagner, former chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology)); in 2000 and 2002 he went back to Yale as visiting fellow at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and of Psychology (Frank Keil, chair of the Department of Psychology; Calabretta et al., 2008), and in 2010 as visiting scholar at the Department of Psychology). His project was “the first example where the origin of modularity was simulated in a computational model, and led to the discovery of a new mechanism for the origin of functional modularity” (see, e.g., Calabretta et al., 2000; Calabretta et al., 2003; Calabretta, 2007).
In 2012 he was visiting scholar at Stanford (James Fishkin, chair of the Department of Communication, and of the Center for Deliberative Democracy; Fishkin & Calabretta, 2012) and is the developer of "doparie", a new intra-party decision-making method. In the spring of 2016 Calabretta returned to Stanford as a Visiting Scholar, and participated in and assisted with the organization of the first Deliberative Poll to be conducted among Stanford students in the campus. He has developed the concept of “doparie” in the books Il film delle emozioni (Gaffi, 2006) and Doparie, dopo le primarie (Nutrimenti, 2010). In 2011 he published the first scientific paper about doparie. In the first months of 2012, he and collaborators (researchers of Harvard Kennedy School of Government and of MIT) conducted the first experiment of online doparia (Klein, Spada & Calabretta, 2012; Iandoli et al., in press; abstract, pdf).
