PRO-BEN Project

A confidential counselling service offering professional psychological support for personal, academic and work-related challenges. The service helps participants strengthen coping strategies, improve emotional wellbeing and enhance resilience.

It is possible to access the individual counseling service by contacting the following email address click to show email. The psychologists will usually reply within 5 days and schedule an appointment within 15 days. Please note that this is not an emergency or psychological crisis intervention service.

Group counselling offers a confidential and professionally facilitated space where members of the SISSA community can reflect on personal and professional challenges related to work, study, everyday life, and emotional experience. Through discussion and attentive listening, participants can explore thoughts, emotions, and interpersonal dynamics, develop greater awareness on relational patterns, and find support through exchange with others. Topics may include stress, relationships, motivation, uncertainty, identity, and life transitions. The service is led by qualified psychologists and counsellors with clinical expertise in mental health.

A yearly programme of talks, panel discussions and public conversations dedicated to mental health, wellbeing and life in academia. By encouraging exchange across disciplines, roles, and perspectives, the events aim to foster greater awareness, reflection, and understanding around the human dimensions of study, work, and community life.

The Women in Leadership Programme is a six-month pathway combining at least five workshops and two individual coaching sessions to help women build leadership skills, expand their networks, and overcome barriers to career progression. It takes a wellbeing-focused approach, covering strengths-based management, healthy communication, values-based leadership, conflict transformation, and leading diverse teams.

It's aimed at women in senior and leadership roles, as well as emerging female leaders among scientific staff — PhD students, postdocs, PIs — and technical-administrative staff. The goal is to build healthier ways of working that support a more respectful and collaborative institutional culture.

The Research in Leadership Programme addresses a common gap: scientific excellence doesn't guarantee management skill. Aimed at faculty, senior researchers and newly appointed PIs at SISSA, it builds capacity in three areas — team management, conflict resolution, and self-care to prevent burnout — through a hybrid mix of group workshops and one-on-one executive coaching.

This programme offers training activities — typically two-to-three-hour workshops — open to the whole school community. Topics include effective communication, collaboration, stress management, time management and conflict resolution, chosen to boost both wellbeing and performance in a demanding environment. Sessions are scheduled based on the community's expressed needs and announced via CUG email, social media and physical posters around the school.

Itinerant Reflections – From the Karst to the Sea is a series of free, guided outdoor walks along scenic Trieste-area trails, including the Napoleonic Road, Rosandra Valley and Farneto Forest, run as part of the PRO-BENE-COMUNE project with the University of Trieste, SISSA and CUS Trieste. Walks pair physical movement with guided conversation on wellbeing topics — motivation, stress management, sleep hygiene, handling mistakes, goal-setting — using guiding questions to spark reflection and connection among participants.

Open to the whole SISSA community by reservation, the walks run Saturday mornings and Wednesday late afternoons in May, June and September, offering a chance to meet new people, discuss wellbeing themes, and enjoy Trieste's surroundings while countering the isolation of academic work.