The Data Lab team | FAO's Data Lab | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Mission

In line with FAO Statistics, the Data Lab aims at supporting member countries in the design and monitoring of evidence-based policy decisions.

By identifying relevant data sources, validating official data reported by countries, and promoting the use of advanced data science methods for unstructured data, the Data Lab serves as a connecting point between different FAO internal and external initiatives.

Meet the Team

The Data Lab is composed of a team of professionals working on different topics. If you want to get in touch, please go to the Contact us section.

Carola Fabi

Senior Statistician in Statistics Division (ESS), where she leads the Methodological Innovation team. She contributed to creating FAO’s Data Lab at the end of 2019. She has over 30 years of experience in the field of statistics and holds a master’s degree in Economic Statistics and a master’s degree in Agricultural Economics.

Gianfausto Bottini

Geospatial Data Scientist working for FAO Data Lab, where he is also involved in NLP projects. His Academic background is in Data Science, especially in Artificial Intelligence applied to Earth Observation. He has in this domain 5+ years of experience. Before joining FAO, he held an equivalent position in a top national company in the sector of Space and Defense.

Hannah Gerits

Data Scientist with the ESS Data Lab where she leverages text mining techniques to extract meaningful information from unstructured data. She holds a master’s degree in Economics from LUISS Guido Carli and a master’s degree in Data Science from Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (Pompeu Fabra). She has previous experience working for the European Central Bank and in consultancy for the Automotive as well as Aerospace and Defense industries.

Craig Matadeen

Data Scientist working with the Data Lab, working on different areas of work from data engineering, software development and infrastructure management. He has a Master's in Data Science from Sapienza University of Roma, with a background in computer science. Previously worked in big data and business intelligence within the telecommunications sector.

Christian Mongeau

Statistician in FAO's Statistics Division, he is skilled in economic analysis, econometrics, data science, programming. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Sapienza University of Rome and has experience also in the academic and private sectors.

Michael Odonkor

Junior Data Scientist contributing to FAO's Data Lab, where he implements data scraping and transformation into statistical datasets. He holds a Master's Degree in Computer Science from Sapienza University of Rome and has previously worked in the education, banking, and insurance sectors.

Marco Scarnò

Senior Statistician and senior Data Scientist, expert of Data Quality, Big Data, surveys and censuses.

Luís G. Silva e Silva

Data Scientist in FAO's Data Lab where he has developed several real-time indicators and dashboards used for early warning. The indicators range from analyzing acceleration in food prices to text sentiment analysis. Prior to joining FAO, he worked in different areas such as Public Health, Marketing, and the Educational field.