Valentina Ferretti

Dr Valentina Ferretti holds a PhD in Decision Analysis (2011, Politecnico of Torino, Italy). Dr Ferretti’s areas of expertise focus on two main themes. The first one is Decision Analytics and the modelling of judgments that can be used in public policy making and management contexts. The second one is economic appraisal of policies and environmental impact assessment of projects and programs, paying particular attention to their spatial dimension. From the synergic blend of these two areas, her research interests focus on exploring behavioural issues in spatial decision-making processes and on developing judgement-based analytics for supporting innovative policy design. Dr Ferretti is an award-winning teacher of Risk and Decision Analysis at LSE.

Experience

Dr Ferretti’s research is regularly presented at leading international conferences and has been published in top international journals, such as the European Journal of Operational Research (ABS level 4), Decision Support Systems (ABS level 3), Environmental Modelling and Software, Land Use Policy, Ecological Indicators, to name the most relevant ones. One of her papers, concerning the integration of Decision Analysis and Spatial Analysis for locational decisions, was awarded the Wiley Practice Prize by the International Society on Multi-Criteria Decision Making in 2011. Her Ph.D. thesis received the Giorgio Leonardi best Ph.D. thesis award in 2012 within the XXXIII Annual Scientific Conference of the Italian Association on Regional Sciences. Her most recent research projects, one dealing with the development of a decision aiding tool to support a Foundation providing educational opportunities for underprivileged children, one dealing with the deployment of a multi-methodology intervention to support planning in a new World Heritage site and a third one dealing with the use of Decision Analytics to design and evaluate regeneration strategies for disused railways, have been awarded the first place in the INFORMS 2017 Decision Analysis Practice Award, the runner up position for the INFORMS 2016 Decision Analysis Practice Award and the second position for the INFORMS 2017 Innovative Application of Analytics Award, respectively.

Dr Ferretti holds research visiting positions at the London School of Economics (UK), at the University of Pittsburgh (USA), at the University of Southern California (USA), at the CNRS LAMSADE Laboratory in Paris (France), at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI - ETH) in Zurich (Switzerland), at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation – ITC of the University of Twente in Enschede (The Netherlands), at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences of Madrid (ICMAT, Spain), at the University of Adger (Grimstad, Norway) and at the Systems Analysis Laboratory in Aalto University in Helsinki (Finland). Moreover, Dr Ferretti holds invited teaching positions at the Blavatnik School of Government of the University of Oxford (UK), at Ecole Centrale Paris (France) and at the University of Trento (Italy) and has been invited to teach masterclasses for the Guardian.