Maria Grazia Pittau has been Associate Professor of Economic Statistics at the Department of Statistical Sciences at Sapienza University of Rome since 2007. Earlier positions include Research Fellow at the Department of Statistics at Columbia University, Assistant Professor at the University of Rome, Research Fellow at the Italian National Statistical Office, Visiting Researcher at CEPS/INSTEAD and at the Institute for Economic Analysis (IAE) in Barcelona (Spain). She received her Ph.D. in quantitative methods from the University of Rome in 1998. Her research interests center on the analysis of inequality, poverty, income mobility and polarization, mainly through the application of data mining, statistics, and modeling.