Letizia Tanca graduated in Mathematics at the University of Naples with a thesis in Mathematical Logic, and later earned her doctorate in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. Before getting her PhD, she worked for four years as a software engineer in the Telecommunications industry. Later, she became research associate, and then associate professor, at Politecnico di Milano. In 1995 she became a Full Professor, first with the University of Bari and later with the University of Verona, where she was President of the just founded Degree Course in Computer Science. Since 1998 Letizia Tanca has been with Politecnico di Milano again as a full Professor (Department of Electronics, Information and Bio-Engineering – DEIB), and is now retired even if she still teaches and produces some research.
In her career in Politecnico,  she served as Chairman of the Board of Studies in Computer Engineering (Milan) from 2000 to 2006, while from 2011 to the end of 2015 she served as Director of the Computer Science Area of DEIB. During her career, she taught courses on the Foundations of Computer Science, Databases and Methodologies and Technologies for Information Systems. Letizia is the author of approximately 200 international publications on databases and the theory of databases (see https://dblp.org/pid/t/LetiziaTanca.html), and in particular of the book ”Logic Programming and Databases”, co-authored by S. Ceri and G. Gottlob.  She has also edited various books and has coordinated the local units of different national and international research projects.
Up to her retirement in 2024 she coordinated her Department’s group in the Project Health Big Data (HBD), with a ten-year duration, funded by the MEF and coordinated by the Ministry of Health, which involves all the Italian  IRCCS most of which belonging to the Alliance Against Cancer, Neuroscience and Neurorehabilitation and Cardiology networks, and is managed by the three Networks in collaboration with the Politecnico di Milano and other partners.  Despite her having retired, she still participates in this research.
Her research interests have included databases for mobile devices, customizing and integrating data in context-driven, peer-to-peer distributed databases, design of quality- and context-aware databases and applications, the data curation pipeline before data analysis. With respect to this last topic, Letizia Tanca is especially interested in the ethical issues inherently involved in the use of data analysis techniques.
Letizia Tanca has been and still is, reviewer of international journals (eg. TODS, VLDB Journal, TPLP, …); and member of the Program Committees, Associate Editor or Chair of several prestigious international conferences.  and in the Steering Committee of SEBD, the Italian conference on Data Management.
Letizia Tanca has been regularly invited as a speaker at several international conferences and workshops, and to teach doctoral courses in several universities and until the end of 2021  has acted as Vice President of the National Group of Computer Engineers (GII) http://www.gii.it/, whose objective is to organize, coordinate and promote, at the Italian national level, the scientific and educational activities of professors and researchers in Engineering Computer Science.
For more information, see https://tanca.faculty.polimi.it/