Brief biography

I was born in Rome,  where I grew up in the Monteverde neighbourhood. Dreaming of becoming an archaeologist, I chose classical studies for my high-school (at Liceo Classico Luciano Manara), but then I ended up developing instead a passion for scientific subjects.

In the period between 1997 and 2002 I studied physics at the university of Rome "La Sapienza". More precisely, the first year I registered and attended courses at the Faculty of Chemistry, but soon I decided to change to Physics. I graduated on September 26, 2002 (Laurea in Fisica cum Laude), with a thesis on quantum deformations of the Poincaré algebra, under the supervision of Giovanni Amelino-Camelia.

In April 2003 I migrated to The Netherlands, to undertake graduate studies at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Utrecht University, under the supervision of Renate Loll, with whom I worked on an approach to Quantum Gravity known as Causal Dynamical Triangulations. I obtained my PhD on June 11, 2007.

From September 2007 until August 2010 I worked as a Postdoctoral researcher in the Quantum Gravity group at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Waterloo, Canada.

On September 2010 I moved back to Europe, and until November 2014 I lived in Berlin, while working as a Postdoc in Hermann Nicolai's "Quantum Gravity and Unified Theories" division at the Albert Einstein Institute, in Golm.

In 2014 I was hired as a permanent researcher at CNRS (France) and so I moved to Paris. From December 2014 until August 2019, I was affiliated to the Mathematical Physics group of the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique d’Orsay.

In September 2019 I changed affiliation and since then I am part of the Mathematical Physics group of the Centre de Physique Théorique (CPHT) of the Ecole Polytechnique.

On the 14th of February 2023 I have obtained the French Habilitation (or HDR, for "habilitation à diriger des recherches"), with a thesis titled "The Melonic Large-N Limit in Quantum Field Theory".