Since November 2007 he is a Full Professor of Statistics in the Department of Economics of the University of Perugia, where he has also been the coordinator of the Doctorate program in “Mathematical and Statistical Methods for the Economic and Social Sciences”. In 1999 he earned a Doctorate degree in Statistics. During 1997 and 2000 he visited, respectively, the School of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Sheffield (UK) and the Department of Statistics of the Penn State University (USA), where he was an Instructor for graduate students. His main research interests are focused on: Longitudinal and panel data, Latent variable and mixture models, Marginal models for categorical data, Optimization and Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms. On these topics, he published papers appeared in prestigious journals, such as: Annals of Statistics, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (series B), Journal of the American Statistical Association, Biometrika, and Econometrica. He is an Associate Editor of the scientific journals: Metron, “Statistical Modelling, and Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (series A) and has been a Referee for the main statistical journals. He is a member of the Academic Board of the Doctorate in Mathematics, Informatics, and Statistics (University of Florence, IT). He was the Principal Investigator of the research grant about “Mixture and latent variable models for causal inference and analysis of socio-economic data”, funded by the Italian Government (FIRB 2012 – “Futuro in ricerca”).