Immanuel is a PhD candidate in Economic Geography at Politecnico di Milano, funded through Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). His research develops ex-ante policy impact assessment tools for childcare expansion investment, combining spatial microsimulation, discrete choice behavioral modeling, and digital twin simulation to evaluate sub-regional policy outcomes in Lombardy. More broadly, he works at the intersection of regional economics, spatial econometrics, and computational social science, with a particular interest in how large-scale spatial modeling can inform evidence-based policy design. Before his PhD, he studied interregional inequality and focused on application of spatial econometrics in investigation of timely and relevant research questions. He researches not only out of professional duty but out of genuine curiosity — driven by the excitement of discovering how places develop, diverge, and respond to intervention.