Silvio Salza was born in Rome on March 5, 1948.

He got a master degree in Electrical Engineering summa cum laude in 1973 from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, and a  postgraduate degree in Computer and System Science from the same University in 1974.

From 1975 to 1991 he has been with the Italian National Research Concil, where since 1986 has been head of the Data and Knowlwdge Base group at the Istituto di Analisi dei Sistemi ed Informatica (IASI-CNR) in Rome.

In 1979 and 1980 he has been on leave from CNR and has joined as a post-doc fellow the IBM T.J.Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heigths, NY.

Since 1991 he is with the University of Rome "La Sapienza". In the last years he has devoted most of his time to the teaching activity. He currently gives courses on Computer Architectures, Operating Systems and Database Systems.

His main research interest is the design and evaluation of large database systems. From an original background in queueing theory and mathematical modelling of computer systems, he has later moved to problems related to the performance analysis of database systems, as  evaluation of query execution costs and analysis and statistical characterization of database application workload. Related activities concern design and management of large data repositories, evaluation of parallel and distributed database systems, and query optimization in database systems.

More recently his research interests have extended to the areas of computer networks, workflow management systems, and data warehousing and data mining.

He has been involved in several national and international projects corcerning the design of advanced database system. His main activities in these projects have been related to architecture design, workflow analysis, and performance evaluation and prediction through mathematical models.