Statistician and Economist (, Paris), PhD in Psychology (, supervisor ), Habilitation in Psychology.
Saadi has 30+ years of experience of management in Industry, Research and Government. Starting with an early headship of a research department at the age of 27, he has directed five research units: the Department of Consumer Science at , the Research group on Sociology of Organizations at , the at EDF R&D, the Department Social Psychology at ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ – which has since become PBS, and currently the . He also directed the doctoral programme in Social Psychology at ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ for six years, and was a member of the steering committee of the (French Prime Minister’s forecast and planning unit). Saadi has been a consultant for global corporations in several sectors, chaired national research programme and evaluated many others, is a member of scientific advisory boards in several top universities and large industries.
Saadi pioneered the use of for the analysis of , he developed , equipping participants with miniature wearable video cameras that provide first-person perspective of the subject’s actions and trigger extremely detailed accounts of subjective experience. He built several large scale scientific surveys, observatory and databases, several still on-going after 30 years, the most recent being the of which he is lead coordinator, and the Food Socioscope.
Saadi has published 100+ articles and chapters on subjects ranging from the or to , in the digital era, , or . He has published six books: on eating (), design (), digitisation (), sustainability (), societal psychology () which presents a framework to analyse behaviour and change it, that helps redesign businesses to become more sustainable. The first chapter is made available free of charge courtesy of Cambridge University Press here. His latest book, (Polity, 2024) is a handbook for changemakers.
See Saadi’s visionary , a more recent one at Stanford on the , and his blog in Psychology Today, .
Saadi is a member of the , and of the European Academy (). Saadi is happy to supervise PhD students on a wide variety of topics, as long as they are prepared to do solid empirical work and he likes the topic.