Team

Cristiano Codagnone
Partner

Cristiano is co-founder of Open Evidence and Aggregate Professor in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Milan and at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. He has over 25 years of scientific, policy-applied research experience spanning across economics, sociology and behavioural studies. Cristiano works at the interdisciplinary frontier of social sciences to develop new theoretical and methodological approaches at the agency/structure juncture. Since 2012 he has focused on experimental behavioural sciences with the aim to introduce novel approaches to policy-making and policy impact evaluation. Cristiano has had researched and worked in the USA, Russia, The Netherlands, Italy and Spain. In the course of his academic career he has taken several leaves of absence to serve as a civil servant at the United Nations and the European Union. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University and a Degree in Economics from Bocconi University. A native Italian speaker, Cristiano is fluent in English, Russian and Spanish.

Diego Polo-Friz
Partner

Diego Polo-Friz is a Professor of management at the State University of Milan. Until 2016 he was the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Tucano Urbano (a motorbike equipment company). From 2005 to 2011 he was General Manager of Finint, a financial intermediary (a so-called Payment Institution, according to the EU Payment Service Directive) active as a Western Union agent in Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom (Western Union is the global leader in money remittance). From 1993 to 2005, he was first a consultant and then a partner with McKinsey & Co. In this role he served clients in Europe and in Israel, leading projects on operating performance improvements (revenues, costs, risks, HR, organization) and on strategy (M&A, JVs, privatizations). From 1989 to 1991 he worked in finance at Glaxo, the pharmaceutical company, in London. Diego Polo-Friz holds an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor's Degree in Business from Bocconi University in Milan. He is the author of “As far back as I can remember, I've always wanted to be the boss: How to Manage a Company”, a book on how to lead and manage an organization.

Ismael Peña-López
Associate Researcher and Research Group Coordinator

Ismael is professor at the School of Law and Political Science of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. He was founding member and then director of the Development Cooperation Programme of the University, where he mainly worked in the fields of e-learning for development and online volunteering. He is the editor of ICTlogy (ISSN 1886-5208). In 2014, he joined Open Evidence to be in charge of the direction of the project of open innovation of the Fundació Jaume Bofill, whose goal is to rethink how knowledge is created and shared inside and outside of the organization. His fields of expertise are the impact of Information and Communication Technologies in Development. Among others, he has worked for Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) on a joint venture with Microsoft and the Swiss Cooperation Agency and another one with the World Bank; for Ericsson on the development of a Smart City index; or for the European Commission in several projects ranging from e-learning to e-inclusion intermediaries. He holds a Ph.D. in the Information and Knowledge Society (2009), a BSc in Economics, a MSc in Ecoaudit and Corporate Planning of the Environment and post-degree in Knowledge Management. A native Catalan and Spanish, Ismael is fluent in English and French.

Laura Cariñena
Finance Officer

Laura Cariñena is the Finance Officer and Office Manager at Open Evidence, in charge of legal and human resources also. With proven experience in Finance, she worked previously at Deloitte, SL as an auditor focused on multinational financial auditory in Pharma and Tourism sectors. Laura also counts with a strong basis on Public Policy and research project management during the time she was at the Technological Center of Catalonia working on a wide variety of topics in different grant programmes. She holds a MSc in Finance and Audit from Barcelona School of Management, an ongoing Master Degree in Conflictology from UNITAR and a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra with a major in Developing Economies from Universitetet i Oslo. Native Catalan and Spanish speaker, Laura is also fluent in English and French and speaks intermediate Norwegian.

Pedro González
Data Analytics and Big Data architect

Pedro is an Data Analytics and Big Data architect at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. He has more than 20 years of experience in the development and design of Information Systems and data architectures. He also participates as a technical advisor and as an associate lecturer in the postgraduate degree on Big Data Analytics at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Pedro is an enthusiastic of Data Science, Data Management and Data Analytics from a business and practical perspective. He has strong mathematical and statistical skills as well as advanced programming and design capabilities, focusing on Data Analytics, Big Data techniques, tools, frameworks and cloud services. He holds a degree in Computer Science from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), a MBA from ESADE Business School (Barcelona), a MSc in Innovation and Research from UPC BarcelonaTech and a postgraduate degree in Business Intelligence from UOC. A Spanish native speaker, Pedro is fluent in English and Catalan.

Antonello Gerbi
Data Analyst

Antonello Gerbi is a Junior Data Scientist with a solid academic background in numerical analysis and a long term experience as a software developer. Antonello got both his Bachelor’s and his Master’s Degrees in Mathematical Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, where he specialized in the field of Computational Sciences. After graduating he obtained his PhD in Mathematics at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where he wrote his thesis with Prof. Alfio Quarteroni as an advisor. The thesis and the research topics covered during the PhD included mathematical modelling and high-performance computing FEM simulation of the human heart. Antonello has been working as teaching assistant for several university courses and as a freelance developer since the end of his Ph.D. Antonello’s main strength resides in his expertise in several fields, ranging from computer science to applied and theoretical mathematics, combined with remarkable programming skills in different languages and frameworks. A native Italian speaker, Antonello is fluent in English and intermediate in French and Portuguese.

Giovanni Liva
Researcher

Giovanni is a researcher with a strong background in EU policies and regulations. At Open Evidence he works both on different projects for the European Commission and for other research projects of behavioural science for private companies. Before joining Open Evidence, Giovanni was a consultant at Edelman, a leading public relations and public affairs consultancy, helping clients with analysis of the European Union regulatory and political environment in different sectors, as well as engaging with relevant political stakeholders to protect, promote and evolve their brands. He also worked for the European Parliament Research Service (EPRS), which provides policy research and in-depth analysis to support the work of the Members of the European Parliament and the parliamentary committees. Giovanni holds a Master Degree in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics (LSE) and a Bachelor Degree in Philosophy from the University of Milan. A native Italian speaker, Giovanni speaks fluently English and intermediate French.

Núria Febrer
Researcher

Núria conducts research in the areas of public policy, innovation and health. Her research tasks combine a range of qualitative and quantitative methods, including literature reviews, online surveys, in-depth interviews, focus groups and case studies. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Linguistics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra and is currently studying a MSc in Societal Challenges and Innovation at the University of Barcelona. At Open Evidence, she is involved in different projects for the European Commission and other public and private organisations, while working mainly in the areas of social innovation and health. Before joining Open Evidence, Núria worked in project management for IMI2 JU projects, participating in communication, dissemination and stakeholder engagement activities. A native Spanish and Catalan speaker, Núria is fluent in English.

Inès Lecland
Researcher

Inès is a researcher specialised in evaluations of local, European-level and international projects and programmes. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Honours International Development from McGill University and a Master’s Degree in Specialized Economic Analysis in International Trade, Finance and Development from the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. Following her studies, she worked as a research assistant for the Institute of Empirical Research in Political Economy. She conducted an ex post analysis of a pilot project in Benin in partnership with the African School of Economics. She then continued as a trainee at the Operations Evaluation division of the European Investment Bank, where she contributed to the final evaluation of the European Fund for Strategic Investment. Inès then worked as an economics consultant for the Land and Water division at the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, before joining the Open Evidence team. A native French speaker, Inès speaks English fluently and has an intermediate level of Spanish.

Lucie Lechardoy
Researcher

Lucie Lechardoy is a senior researcher with a thorough knowledge of EU policies and expertise in a wide range of policy areas including digital policies, support to SMEs, consumer issues, justice and education. Lucie’s experience relates in particular to evaluations, impact assessments and exploratory studies for a range of EU institutions. Before joining Open Evidence, Lucie was a Senior Research Manager at VVA, a public policy consultancy providing economic, market and regulatory advice to public sector institutions. Previously, Lucie worked at the Executive Agency for Small and Medium sized Enterprises (EASME) as project officer where she participated in the launch and the management of calls for proposals under the COSME programme. Prior to this, Lucie was a junior project manager in the consultancy Business & Strategies Europe, where she managed framework contracts and tenders for the European Commission in the field of economic development. Lucie holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Sciences and a Master’s degree in European Affairs from Sciences Po Bordeaux, France. A native French speaker, Lucie is fluent in English, with intermediate Spanish and Dutch and basic Swedish.

Riccardo Valente
Researcher

Riccardo is a sociologist and his work is focused on the analysis of socio-spatial deprivation and the incidence of socially constructed anxieties on people’s feelings of unsafety. He completed his studies in four countries (Italy, France, Belgium and Spain) and obtained his PhD degree from the University of Barcelona in 2016. He has an extensive knowledge on European Union’s funding programmes, and he has been the scientific coordinator of the project MARGIN (2015-2017) funded by the Horizon 2020 programme. He recently spent one year as a post-doc researcher at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. A native Italian speaker, Riccardo speaks fluently Spanish, English, and French, and intermediate Portuguese.

Francisco Lupiáñez-Villanueva
Partner

Francisco is co-founder of Open Evidence and Associate Professor at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. His research is focused on the social, economic, cultural and policy issues arising from information and communication technologies, particularly on networked citizenship, eHealth, and eInclusion. Francisco has been a research fellow in the Department of Sociology - Science & Technology Studies Unit at the University of York, and a Scientific and Project Officer at the Joint Research Centre - Information Society Unit of the European Commission (JRC-IPTS) where he worked on economic evaluation and modelling of Personal Health Systems. He has a wealth of experience on multivariate statistical analysis and survey research. Francisco holds a Ph.D. in Information and Knowledge Society at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and a degree in Economics from Universidad de Oviedo. A Spanish native speaker, Francisco is fluent in English and Catalan.

Josep Maria Duart
UOC professor and researcher

Josep Maria is full professor in Psychology and Educational Sciences at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. He has been involved in several positions: vice president for Postgraduate Studies and Lifelong Learning, and former director of the International Graduate Institute at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and Director of the UOC-UNESCO Chair in e-Learning (2002-2009). Currently, Josep Maria teaches on education and technology field, educational models and quality and is member of the Open Evidence Research Group. As a researcher specialising in Educational Technology, e-learning models and educational organisation, he leads and collaborates on research projects in areas such as educational policy, higher education leadership and ICT use. Josep Maria has published several books and a range of co-authored articles in international specialist journals (ORCID). He has also given lectures on ICTs in higher education at international conferences and European, American and Australian universities. Josep Maria is the Editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education (ETHE), member of the EDEN (European Distance Education and E-learning Network) Executive Committee, and member of “ The University of the Future Network”. He holds a Ph.D. in Education from Universitat Ramon Llull, a MBA from ESADE Business School, and a degree in History from Universitat de Barcelona.

Andrea Saltelli
Professor and researcher

Andrea has worked on physical chemistry, environmental sciences, applied statistics, impact assessment and science for policy. His main disciplinary focus is on sensitivity analysis of model output, a discipline where statistical tools are used to interpret the output from mathematical or computational models, and on sensitivity auditing, an extension of sensitivity analysis to the entire evidence-generating process in a policy context. Andrea has worked for 33 year at the Joint Research Centre, leading for ten years the unit of econometrics and applied statistics. He enjoyed training EC staff in impact assessment methodologies, and providing methodological and technical support to many directorates of the EC. Andrea also worked on statistical indicators and on the use of multi-criteria methodologies. He is one of the co-authors the OECD-JRC official handbook for composite indicators. His most recent papers have tackled sensitivity analysis and auditing, the future of statistics, the rational of evidence based policy, and various critiques of problematic quantifications. Andrea publishes regularly on the crisis of science and the post-truth discussion in the online journal The Conversation, and gives courses in sensitivity analysis, sensitivity auditing and ethics of quantification. At present he is adjunct professor at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities (SVT) - University of Bergen (UIB), where he cooperates with a team interested in post normal science. Andrea lives in Barcelona where he leads the European Centre for Governance in Complexity, a Norwegian NGO located at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB). www.andreasaltelli.eu

Sam MacIntyre
Data Analyst

Sam is a Data Scientist with a background in statistics, consulting and scientific research. He is in charge of elaborating data pre-processing and data modelling tasks as well as exploratory and statistical data analyses. Before joining Open Evidence, Sam was at Kernel Analytics (now a part of BCG Gamma), a market-leading data science consultancy in Spain, where he worked as a data scientist to optimise the menu selection of a food e-commerce company. He also worked as a researcher for the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) in Australia, where he developed a dashboard for the statistical analysis of HDX (Hydrogen Deuterium Exchange) binding experiments. Sam holds a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from The University of Melbourne and a Master in Data Science from The Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (BGSE). He is a native speaker of English, advanced in Spanish and is conversational in French.

Devvrat Shekhawat
Data Analyst

Devvrat is a Data Scientist with a background in computer science, data science, scientific research, innovation, entrepreneurship and consulting. He is in charge of elaborating data pre-processing and data modelling tasks as well as exploratory and statistical data analyses. Before joining Open Evidence, Devvrat worked as a Digital consultant at EIT ICT Labs and as a Data analyst intern at Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz, DFKIwhere he researched new technology trends in the areas of AI, ML, NLP as well as data pipeline applications such as ETL. Devvrat holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and also holds Master degree from TU Berlin and Sorbonne University Paris. Devvrat has published scientific papers on sentiment analysis using machine learning at the conference ACM MEDES’19. A Hindi native speaker Devvrat is fluent in English.

Alexandra Theben
Researcher

Alexandra is a senior researcher at Open Evidence with a strong background in European policies and regulation. Prior to joining Open Evidence, Alexandra worked for a legal consulting in Germany and a business promotion centre of the Catalan Govenrment in Asia. She holds a Master’s Degree in European Legal Integration from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and M.Sc. in European Economic Governance awarded from the University of Twente. Next to her position as senior researcher at Open Evidence, she is a PhD researcher in Information and Knowledge Society at the University of Catalonia (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya). Her current areas of research include media policy, youth entrepreneurship and behavioural economics. Alexandra masters a range of quantitative and qualitative methods. Her expertise covers various research methodologies, including literature reviews, designing questionnaires and guidelines for interviews and surveys; conducting in-depth interviews, focus groups and case studies; designing and execution of behavioral experiments; and report writing. Alexandra has co-authored more than ten Scientific and Technical Research Reports for the European Commission’s Institute for Prospective Technological Studies related to integrated care (Case Study Reports on Strategic Intelligence Monitor on Personal Health Systems Phase 3 (SIMPHS3) and numerous studies and final reports for the European Commission. She is a German native speaker and is fluent in English and in Spanish.

Frans Folkvord
Researcher

Frans is a postdoctoral researcher at the Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, and assistant professor at the Communication Science Institute, Amsterdam University, The Netherlands. His research focuses on sociology, behavioural economics, communication science, and psychology, predominantly examining the effect of health promotion on actual behaviour. He has expertise in quantitative and qualitative data analysis, conducting, amongst others, randomized controlled trials, focus groups, surveys and analysing big data sets. Frans holds a PhD in Social Sciences (cum laude), a master degree in Sociology and in Psychology, and a bachelor degree in psychology, from the Radboud University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. A Dutch native speaker, and fluent in German and English.

Simone Vitiello
Researcher

Simone is a researcher with a strong background in EU economic policies and expertise in a wide range of policy areas including, collaborative economy, employment, entrepreneurship, financial sector and space policy. He worked mainly on explanatory studies, impact assessments, costs evaluation as well as cross-country data collection and analysis. Most projects were carried out for the European Commission, DG Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs, as well as other DGs and EU agencies. Before joining Open Evidence, Simone was a consultant for VVA Europe, a public policy consultancy providing economic, market and regulatory advice to public sector institutions. He also worked at Deloitte Italy in strategic and operational consulting for the financial sector and he participated in a traineeship programme at the European Parliament. His academic credentials include a Double Degree Master of Science in European Economics at Maastricht School of Business and Economics and Université Catholique de Louvain and a Bachelor Degree in International Economics and Management at Bocconi University. A native Italian speaker, Simone speaks fluently English, Spanish and intermediate French.

Alena Sokolyanskaya
Researcher

Alena is a researcher with a strong quantitative background and expertise in a wide range of policy areas including trade economics and development. She is currently doing a Master of Research in Economics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. Alena also holds a Master’s Degree in Specialized Economic Analysis in International Trade, Finance and Development from the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. She has experience working as a researcher at the Russian Foreign Trade Academy and the Russian APEC Study Center providing policy advice for the Russian government. She was leading and supervising projects devoted to regional integration and WTO-related issues, participating and consulting in preliminary negotiations. Additionally, she worked as a research assistant at the Department of Economics at the University Pompeu Fabra, and as a Bridges Graduate Fellow for the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) in Geneva. A native Russian speaker, Alena is fluent in English and German, and has an intermediate level of Spanish.

Giuseppe Veltri
Research Fellow

Giuseppe Alessandro Veltri holds a BA in Psychology of Communication from the University of Siena, an MSc in Social Research Methods (Statistics) from the Methodology Institute of the London School of Economics (LSE) and a PhD in Social Psychology from the LSE. He is Associate Professor of Research Methodology and Cognitive Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento. He was Senior Lecturer at University of Leicester. He has been Lecturer at University of East Anglia and a scientific fellow at the European Commission JRC Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS). Before joining the IPTS, he has been a research associate at the Institut Jean Nicod (Ecole Normale Supérieure) in Paris. He has published in scientific journals such as Nature, PLOS One, Computers in Human Behavior, Public Understanding of Science, Big Data & Society and others.

Albert Sanchez Gelabert
Researcher

Albert is a researcher at Open Evidence and adjunct professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Albert holds a university degree in Sociology and a master degree of Research on Applied Sociology by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He has more than 10 years of experience working both as a researcher and as a professor in several universities and research groups. Albert has expertise in quantitative and qualitative data analysis. His current areas of research and interest include education inequality, higher education, vocational education and training, lifelong learning and educational pathways. A native Catalan and Spanish speaker, Albert is fluent in English and intermediate German.

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