Dr. Michelangelo Giampaoli is an anthropologist and cultural heritage curator. He earned his PhD in Ethnology and Anthropology from the University of Perugia, Italy (2010), where he also taught cultural anthropology for several years at the School of Medicine and Surgery. Over the past fifteen years, Dr. Giampaoli has been involved in the research and enhancement of cemeteries as places of collective memory, identity and public education in Italy, France, Brazil and the United States. As a member of an international research team, he also carried out research on public health, community empowerment, and deinstitutionalization in mental health in both Italy and Brazil. He teaches courses on cemeteries in Chicago and ethnographic methods.