Born in Taranto, Italy • Birth year 1983 • Studied Mathematics at Università del Salento in Lecce, Italy – PhD at Université de Genève • Highest Degree PhD in Mathematics • Lives in Rome, Italy • Occupation Data Scientist at Enel
I was never good at math until high school. When I was a child, I loved spending my time reading and writing rhyming poems, so everyone in my family was sure my path would have had something to do with liberal arts. For this reason, they were really surprised (and probably worried) to hear I decided to start scientific studies in high school: for me it was a challenge, but I thought that by doing this I would have had a more complete education. There, I met a teacher who changed my life by starting to show math to me as a sequence of logical steps. I began finding it funny, logical, and telling everybody that to me, doing math exercises was comparable to playing crosswords.
After high school, it was logical for me to then start my studies in math in academia, with the idea to become a teacher. But in the end, I decided to complete my studies with a PhD in numerical analysis in Geneva, where I could also study different languages and meet people with different stories and backgrounds.
I really missed my country, my habits, my family, my friends, and therefore coming back home was a fundamental step to being happy in my life.
All the experiences I had while pursuing my PhD made me realize that I loved studying math, but that I prefer to apply it rather than develop new methods and proofs and, furthermore, that living in Italy was fundamental to me: I really missed my country, my habits, my family, my friends, and therefore coming back home was a fundamental step to being happy in life. I then decided to accept a postdoc position in neuroscience in Rome. I loved this job, but it was always meant to be a smooth transition towards the corporate world, where I would start to apply what I love to something more concrete by learning about machine learning and data science.
This experience helped me greatly in landing my current job, about six months after the end of my postdoc. I now work as a data scientist at Enel, one of the biggest private renewable energy companies in the world, in a huge group of data scientists that supports all the businesses and internal service functions, like procurement, in the company. My first projects consisted in applying machine learning techniques to detect faults in power plants, and I was very happy to finally see a real-world application for all my studies. Then I started to develop algorithms for the procurement field and now my main activity is undertaking a huge initiative to forecast the company’s income statement to support management decisions.
For all these reasons, when I think about my path, I am very happy about it, because it seems like I could, in the end, integrate all the different souls I had in my life (…)
What I really love about my current job is that it is based on applying math to the real world, but it is also really focused on relationships. Besides the modeling activities we carry out, I am also coordinating a small group of colleagues and I am involved in many other activities to spread data culture throughout the company with education and communication projects. One of the projects I am most proud of is the creation and the organization of an upskilling program called “Data School”, in which my team provides courses on topics related to data to colleagues of all areas. I think that engaging with people on topics related to data is a fundamental step to collaborate with them and support the data-driven transformation that is the main mission of my team.
For all these reasons, when I think about my path, I am very happy about it, because it seems like I could, in the end, integrate all the different souls I had in my life: the little girl writing poems, the student that wanted to be a teacher, and the rigorous mathematician.