Professor Francesco Mola previously held the positions of Vice Rector (2015-2021) and President of the Guarantee Committee, Director of the Department of Economics (2003-2007), Director of the Department of Economics and Business Sciences (2012-2015), President of the Degree Course in Economics and Business Management, Director of the Master in Management of Environmental, Cultural and Tourism Heritage, Member of the University’s Centre for Quality and Evaluation.

In 1989 he obtained a degree in Economics (curriculum Statistics and Mathematics) and in 1993 a Ph.D. in Computational Statistics, Data Analysis and Applications at the University of Naples Federico II, after periods of study and research in France (INRIA of Rocquencourt, CISIA and CNAM of Paris) and in the Czech Republic (Department of Mathematics and Probability, and Physics Faculty of the University of Prague). Later, he was University Researcher of Statistics at the University of Naples (1993-1998), Associate Professor of Methodological Statistics at the University of Cagliari (1998-2005), Full Professor since 2005.

Member of the board of the International Association for Statistical Computing (IASC, 2011-2015) and President of CLADAG since 2019.

Main areas of scientific research: Data Mining and Pattern recognition, Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, Decision Support System, Big Data, Statistical data quality (statistical data editing, missing data imputation, data validation), Customer Satisfaction and Customer Relationship Management, Statistical Learning, Computational Statistics, Multivariate Data Analysis, Ant Colony Optimisation, semi-parametric and parametric modelling, as well as causal inference.

Author and co-author of numerous publications, which have been published in national and international journals, he has been the president of the organising and scientific committees of numerous international conferences.