Sebastiano Pelizza is a professor emeritus of tunnel construction at Politecnico di Torino. He is specialized in underground construction, soil and rock improvement and reinforcement; construction methods and TBM tunneling.

He has been a consultant, designer and supervisor for the construction of hundreds of tunnels (road, railway, subway, hydraulic) for hundreds of kilometers in Italy and abroad. He has also published over 210 technical and scientific papers, as well as having presented various publications on underground constructions at several international congresses. In 2015 he won the ITA-AITES International Tunnelling Awards Lifetime achievement award.