Senior Data Scientist

RaboResearch

Biography

I am a researcher with a long experience on analysing the link between climate and other fields, from energy to agriculture. I have a Ph.D. in computer engineering with a thesis titled Application of Computational Intelligence to Energy Systems. Currently I am a Senior Data Scientist at the Sustainability and Data Analytics group at RaboResearch. Before, I have been a Scientific Officer at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre “Knowledge for the Energy Union” unit in the Energy, Transport and Climate Directorate (Directorate C).

Interests
  • Modelling
  • Climate Services
  • Energy & Meteorology
  • Machine-learning
Education
  • PhD in Computer Science & Automation, 2011

    University of Rome " Roma Tre"

  • Laurea Specialistica in Automation Engineering, 2007

    University of Rome " Roma Tre"

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Senior Data Scientist
Nov 2022 – Present The Netherlands
Part of the team Sustainability and Data Analytics at RaboResearch, Rabobank’s knowledge center. Working in the analysis of the physical climate risk of bank assets and in facilitating the transition of RaboResearch to a new and more efficient data analytics platform.
 
 
 
 
 
Scientific Officer
Mar 2018 – Oct 2022 The Netherlands

Part of the Knowledge For The Energy Union unit. Analysis of power systems and scenario supporting EU Green Deal policies: study on the impact of hydrogen blending in EU power systems, assessment on the production of green hydrogen under Fit for 55 and REPowerEU scenarios, impact assessment for TEN-E infrastructures, study on coal phase out in EU in 2030.

Involved in the WEFE (Water, Energy, Food and Ecosystems Nexus) institutional project. Support for data visualisation and data mining for the SET Plan reporting. Data management and creation of several open energy databases (JRC Power Plant dataset, JRC Hydro-power database, JRC ERA-NUTS).

Part of the advisory board of Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) “Energy” operational, H2020 S2S4E project, JPI Climate CLIM2POWER. Evaluator for C3S proposals. Guest editor for the Climate Services journal.

Knowledge management activities and co-organiser of the annual community “Next Generation Energy Climate modelling” (NextGenEC) and its annual workshop.

  • Modelling power systems in Europe and Africa
  • Climate and energy data analysis and machine learning
  • Impact of climate variability and change on European energy policies
  • Development and analysis of power system models for Western African and South African power pools
  • Hydrogen modelling
 
 
 
 
 
Staff Scientist
Jul 2007 – Mar 2018 Rome & Bologna, Italy

In the period 2010-2018 I have carried out research on energy & meteorology, with a specific focus on climate services. I was involved in the following projects: H2020 MED-GOLD (preparation and coordination team), H2020 S2S4E, H2020 CRESCENDO, INTERREG STRATUS (P.I. for ENEA), Copernicus Climate Change Service contract ECEM (P.I. for ENEA), FP7 SPECS (WP leader on pilot applications), FP7 EUPORIAS, FP7 CLIM-RUN. I managed a service contract with TERNA S.p.A., the Italian electricity TSO, to help them to analyse the added value in the use of state-of-art climate information for electricity demand and solar power forecasting.

In the period 2007-2010 I was research fellow in the Energy Efficiency Department. I have carried out research activity in collaboration with the Distributed Generation Technical Unit in the development of optimisation models for renewable energy management and control methods for building management. I have also carried out research in the field of Evolutionary Computation and Computational Intelligence for energy time-series forecasting and combined-cycle power plants optimisation. Visiting scientist in the CERCIA at the University of Birmingham (UK).