Marco Reale obtained a laurea cum laude in economics from the University of Rome “la Sapienza” with a dissertation in statistics in 1992. Immediately after graduating, he joined the Osservatorio e Centro Studi Monetari (OCSM): an economic research center within the University LUISS. In the two years there, he built, jointly with Mario Tirelli, an econometric model for the Italian monetary economy. In 1994, he moved to Lancaster University, where he was awarded a PhD in Mathematics in 1999 with a thesis on multivariate time series under the supervision of Granville Tunnicliffe Wilson and Stuart Coles. Before the official graduation (February 1999), he took up a lectureship in this school, where he is now an associate professor. He held visiting positions at the University of Naples “Federico II”, the 3rd University of Rome, the University of Pau and Pays de l’Adour, and the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. In 2013, he served on the New Zealand consumer price index advisory committee. He currently coordinates the programme in Financial Engineering.