Ferdinando Scala (born May 24, 1969) is an Italian biologist, science and technology journalist and historian, specialized in strategy and military history.
Born in Portici, he spent his first year of life in Foggia, where his father was servicing as a warrant officer of the Italian Air Force, and then he moved to San Giorgio a Cremano, that he then always considered his hometown. Here he frequented elementary and middle school, and then he spent the first two years of high school at Liceo Classico Statale "Quinto Orazio Flacco" of Portici.
A cadet of the class 1984-87 of Nunziatella Military School of Naples, he studied together with Antonio Mele, Marco Mattiucci, Valerio Gildoni, Antonio De Crescentiis, and Bepi Pezzulli. Admitted at Military Academy of Modena as a cadet officer of 169o class, he resigned and enrolled as a student of biological sciences of the University of Naples Federico II.
Graduated summa cum laude in March 1995, he spent one year of research work at CNR-ISPAIM institute of Ercolano, then in January 1997 he won a yearly research fellowship and he was assigned to the Centre d'Ecologie Fonctionelle et Evolutive, a CNRS institute of Montpellier. In this period, he performed research activity in the field of satellite and airborne remote sensing applications to environmental monitoring in collaboration with the Joint Research Center of the European Commission and DLR. He further collaborated with European Space Agency to the ENVISAT mission, and finally he participated as author to the Italian National Communication to Fight Desertification in the UNCCD framework.
Having abandoned his scientific career, in 1998 he moved to the pharmaceutical industry, where he held positions in Italy and abroad in marketing & sales for Abbott, Menarini, Takeda, Serono, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Allergan, and living between Florence, Rome and Dublin. In 2010 he moved to management consulting in Publicis Groupe, also in the pharmaceutical sector, working at global level for Healthware International as Strategy Director.