Andrea Saltelli

Andrea Saltelli (born August 26, 1953, in Rome, Italy) is an Italian scholar studying quantification with statistical and sociological tools, extending the theory of sensitivity analysis to sensitivity auditing.

Andrea worked on physical chemistry, environmental statistics, impact assessment and science for policy.

He was Councellor at the UPF Barcelona School of Management.

Saltelli received his degrees in inorganic chemistry from the Sapienza University of Rome in the summer of 1976.

He then worked at the Italian Nuclear Authority ENEA and for one year at the Argonne National Laboratory in the United States.

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 has been translated into 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.

Andrea Saltelli has collaborated with Silvio Funtowicz, Jerome R. Ravetz and Jeroen van der Sluijs on theories and applications of post-normal science.

He also worked with the Belgian sociologist Paul-Marie Boulanger on the application of the theories on Niklas Luhmann to the reproducibility crisis in scientific research and to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the Norwegian economist Erik Reinert on themes related to quantification in economics, and with Daniel Sarewitz on the post-truth debate.

In an interview for 'The Corbet Report', Andrea Saltelli noted his early fascination with the production of quantified evidence via statistical or mathematical modelling and his puzzlement to see how easy it was to produce evidence of a poor quality, or altogether to cheat or deceive with numbers.

The attention to responsible production of numbers led him to his involvement into issues of epistemology, philosophy of science, and science for policy.

This motivated him to extend the theory of sensitivity analysis to sensitivity auditing, which aims to provide an assessment of the entire knowledge- and model-generating process, inclusive of explicit or implicit assumptions, interests, stakes and motivations of the developers.

According to existing guidelines including from the European Commission, sensitivity auditing becomes relevant when the results from a modelling exercise feed into a political decision process.

He worked at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, until 2015, 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.