Mariano Porcu has been a full professor of social statistics since 2014 at the University of Cagliari. From 2006 to 2014, he was an associate professor, and from 2002 to 2006, assistant professor. Between 2000 and 2002, he worked as a researcher at the Italian National Institute of Statistics in Rome. In 2000, he gained his PhD in Applied Statistics at the University of Palermo and, in 1997, the Postgraduate Diploma in Statistics & Operational research at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Essex (UK).

He teaches “Social Statistics” and “Models and Methods for the Evaluation” at the Economics, Law and Political Sciences faculty. He also teaches Applied Statistics in the University of Cagliari Master programs. In the past, he taught Social Statistics and Economics Statistics.

From 2007 to 2015, he was a member of the evaluation committee of the University of Cagliari, where he focused his activity for the surveys on students’ evaluation of teaching.

In 2013, he was a visiting researcher at the University of Kentucky (USA), where he developed an ongoing fruitful scientific collaboration with colleagues at the College of Education.

His research activity is mainly focused on studies that evaluate educational systems. Specifically, the main area of interest concerns the building up of adjusted composite indicators for the evaluations of institutional performances. The main publications in this framework apply and show the potential of latent variable modelling approaches (Latent Class Analysis and Item Response Models) and quantile regression for addressing specific research questions in the educational field. In the survey framework that measures teaching quality in students’ perception, an area of interest concerns methods for missing data treatment based on Multiple Imputation Analysis. Furthermore, the determinants of graduates' rates of employability have been analysed by adopting Boolean Regression models; on this framework, other researchers have addressed the study of the determinants of graduates' entrance time to the labour market and students’ mobility. In the framework of composite indicators, he is also working on research related to the adjusted measures of GDP and family well-being. He has collaborated in research concerning the study of factors which affect the duration of marriages in Italy (investigated using a quantile regression model for censored data) and the duration of the interval between marriage and first birth and interval between successive births (investigated using Segmented Regression Models for discrete data). While he was a researcher at the Department of Economic Statistics of the National Institute of Statistics, he worked on probabilistic models for determining the activity status of enterprises. In the past, some research activities have also been addressed in the health field and led, in collaboration with teams of medical researchers, to the publication of two works applied to urological problems.

Since 2001, he has been a member of the Italian Statistical Society. He is also on the research staff of CIRD (Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Education, University of Cagliari). Since 1999, he had numerous talks at conferences and workshops of international and national relevance.

He has been a referee for the following journals: Statistical Methods & Applications; Quality & Quantity; Procedia Economics and Finance; Journal of Applied Statistics; Journal of the Royal Statistics Society, Genus.