Andrea Saltelli

Some authors credit Andrea Saltelli for having given impulse to the field of uncertainty and sensitivity analysis, also via the creation of the SAMO conference series started in 1995, and two handbooks, one of which translated in Chinese. In these and other works he introduced the concepts of global sensitivity analysis, and total sensitivity indices, helping to disseminate the variance-based sensitivity analysis work of the Russian mathematician Ilya M. Sobol, with whom he collaborated. His formulae for computing efficiently the variance based sensitivity indices have been considered useful by practitioners. He has worked on climate change, ranking of higher education, the ecological footprint, and composite indicators. More recent works are on the reproducibility of scientific results, principles for mathematical modelling and on ethics of quantification.

Saltelli received his degrees in inorganic chemistry from the Sapienza University of Rome in summer 1976. He then worked at the Italian Nuclear Authority ENEA and for one year at the Argonne National Laboratory in the United States. Till 2015 he worked at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, leading for fifteen years a team devoted to econometrics and applied statistics. Between 2016 and 2020 he was associate professor at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities (Senter for vitenskapsteori) at the University of Bergen.