User:Davide Mana

Davide Mana (Torino, 1967)

Having spent too much time as a kid on books about dinosaurs, Davide Mana got his degree with honours in Earth Sciences with a dissertation on the Paleoecology of the Messinian Plankton Foraminifera of Sicily. He later got his PhD in Earth Sciences in the University of Urbino, with a research work on Micro Hydro renewable energy generation.

He has worked as a translator and languages teacher, as call-center drone, web designer, computer programmer, car salesman, lecturer, lab technician, researcher and scarecrow. As a freelance researcher in Micropaleontology and Paleostatistics, he collaborated with the Università di Torino and with companies in the private sector. He taught Paleostatistics and Data Analysis for Natural Sciences in post-grad and post-doc courses held by the universities of Trieste, Parma, Urbino and Torino.

A committed anglophile with an unhealthy passion for the Elizabethan era, Davide is an active member of the global roleplayer community, and has been keeping a regular team since 1992; he published game-related articles in The Whisperer, The Black Seal, D20 Weekly, and has contributed material to Delta Green: Countdown (Pagan Publishing, 1999). This led to later engagements as professional game designer. In Italy, he published scientific articles and, outside of his professional field, he contributed a regular column to independent literary magazine LN LibriNuovi, reviewing fantasy fiction. Between 2003 and 2010 he was co-editor of the fantasy fiction collection Alia (CoopStudi). He contributed articles to the essay collections "Fritz Leiber: Critical Essays" (McFarland 2007), "Dissecting Hannibal Lecter: Essays on the Novels of Thomas Harris" (McFarland 2008) and "American Exorcist: Critical Essays on William Peter Blatty" (McFarland 2008), all edited by Benjamin Szumskyj. One of his stories appears in the collection of stories "Kizuna: Fiction for Japan" Edited by Brent Millis and Robert M. Price in 2011. As a game designer, his work and translations have been published by Savage Worlds Italia/GGStudios. He self-publishes his short fiction and some of his non-fiction. His first novel, "The Ministry of Thunder" was published in 2014 by Acheron Books

An active blogger both in Italian and English, Davide collects old books, digs jazz and canto-pop, enjoys anime and Wikipedia, and is an efficient cook.