Raised and educated in Rome, Italy, Giovanni completed a double major Bachelor degree in Statistics and Economics from the university La Sapienza in Rome. He completed his Masters and Ph.D. in Statistics at the University of Waterloo in 1994 and 1998, respectively. He was associate professor at the Polytechnic University of Catalunya in Spain, then moved to work in the area of Privacy Protection first at the National Statistics Office (ISTAT) in Rome and then at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in London, UK. He was employed for several years at a large hedge fund based in London, UK, researching systematic trading strategies for Futures. He returned to Academia in 2010, first at RMIT Vietnam and then at Xian Jiaotong-Liverpool University in China and later in India.

Giovanni’s research interests span from Multivariate Analysis to Privacy Protection and Statistical Learning, with a strong interest in computation, data analysis and visualization. He authored several refereed publications. He is proficient in programming, favouring the statistical language R and C++0, among others.

<strong>ACADEMIC QUALIFICATIONS  </strong>
<ul>
<li>Doctor of Philosophy (2004 – 2009)  – The University of Sydney, Australia. Thesis: Drawing on the Virtual Collective: Exploring Online Collaborative Creativity</li>
<li>Master of Higher Education (1994 -1998) The University of New South Wales, Australia
Bachelor of Arts (Hons) Fine Arts (1981-1984)  – Bristol Polytechnic, England (UK)</li>
</ul>
<strong>PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS  </strong>
<ul>
<li>British University Vietnam (BUV) – Senior Lecturer (2025 – Current)</li>
<li>Aliance University and MIT World Peace University (India)  – Professor (2022-2023)</li>
<li>Xian Jiaotong-Liverpool University (China) Lecturer V (2016-2022)</li>
<li>RMIT University (Vietnam)  – Senior Lecturer (2010 – 2016)</li>
<li>Winton Capital Management  – Quantitative Analyst (2006-2009)</li>
<li>ISTAT (Italy) and ONS (UK)  – Senior Methodologist (2002-2006)</li>
<li>Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (Spain)  – Assoc. Professor (1999 – 2001)</li>
</ul>
<strong>RESEARCH AREAS / FIELDS </strong>
<ul>
<li>Multivariate analysis</li>
<li>Computational Statistics</li>
<li>Machine Learning</li>
</ul>
<strong>RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS </strong>
<ul>
<li>Merola G. M, Chen G. (2019) – Projection sparse principal component analysis: An efficient least squares method. Journal of Multivariate Analysis. 173. pp. 366-382.</li>
<li>McCauley B., Gumbley S., Merola G. M. and Do, T. (2016) – Facebook in Vietnam: Uses, Gratifications &amp; Narcissism. Open Journal of Social Sciences 04(1 1):69-79. <a href=”http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=72343″>http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=72343</a></li>
<li>Merola G. and Abraham B. (2002) Dimensionality Reduction Approach to Multivariate Prediction. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis Journal, Special Issue on PLS.</li>
</ul>
<strong>RESEARCH &amp; CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS / EXHIBITIONS</strong>
<ul>
<li>62nd ISI World Statistics Congress 2019 (IS WSC 2019), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.Improved estimation of Wealth Indices from asset counts.</li>
<li>61st ISI World Statistics Congress 2017 (ISI WSC 2017), Marrakech, Morocco.High Frequency Financial Time Series, Pattern Recognition and Volatility.</li>
<li>International Symposium on Business and Industrial Statistics 2012 (ISBIS) Bangkok, Thailand. A New Framework for Measuring Disclosure Risk for Tabular Data.</li>
</ul>
<strong>RESEARCH GRANTS</strong>
<ul>
<li>2019 Summer Undergraduate Research Framework grant from Xian Jiaotong-Liverpool University for supervising undergraduate student research project “Analysis of Chinese stock prices with respect to risk reward” 5,000RMB.</li>
<li>2019 Research Development Fund from Liverpool University for carrying out the project “Reducing the effect of data clumping in the estimation of wealth indices” 60,400 RMB. In collaboration with Dr. Bob Baulch of IFPRI (Malai), Prof. Marco Bonetti of Bocconi (Italy) and Dr. Yang Chen of XJTLU.</li>
<li>2012 Personal grant from Italian Institute for Commerce, Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam. Analys of the perception of “Made in Italy” in Vietnam. 20,000USD. Project in Collaboration with Dr. Mattia Miani.</li>
</ul>