Massimo Rudan received a degree in Electrical Engineering in 1973 and a degree in Physics in 1976, both from the University of Bologna. He joined the then Institute of Electronics (now Department DEI) of the University of Bologna in 1975. In 1990, M.R. was appointed Full Professor of Microelectronics at the University of Bologna. From 1978 to 2019 he has been teaching about 100 courses in the field of Electronics in the Faculty of Engineering of the same University (in 2012 "Faculty of Engineering" has been changed into "School of Engineering and Architecture"). Starting from the academic year 2010-2011, the class on Solid-state Electronics is given in English in the frame of the international Programme in Electronics.
Since 1983 M. R. has been working in a group involved in investigations on physics of carrier transport and numerical analysis of semiconductor devices, and has coordinated several projects funded by Public Agencies or Companies. In 1986-1987 he was a visiting scientist at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center at Yorkton Heights, NY, studying the discretization techniques for the higher-order moments of the Boltzmann Transport Equation. He collaborated with IBM for several years afterwards, investigating and implementing impact-ionization models based on the average energy of the carriers and studying solution schemes of the Boltzmann Equation based on the spherical-harmonics expansion.
From 2008 he is IEEE Fellow, from 2014 IEEE Life Fellow. With Prof. H. Baltes of ETH Zuerich and Prof. W. Goepel of the University of Tuebingen, M. R. is a recipient of the 1998 Koerber Foundation Award for the Project “Elektronische ‘Mikronase’ fuer fluechtige organische Verbindungen” (Electronic ‘Micronose’ for Volatile Organic Compounds).
From 1998 to 2010 he has been President of the Board of Electronics of the University of Bologna, and from 2007 to 2012 he has been President of the teaching Board of the Faculty of Engineering. He is one of the founders of the Advanced Research Center for Electronics Systems, founded in 2001 at the University of Bologna.
Since 1999 he is President of the Board for the implementation of the ISO-9000 quality processes in the University of Bologna.
M.R. has authored about 300 papers in international journals or proceedings of international conferences in the field of physical modelling and numerical analysis of solid-state devices; he is author, co-author, or editor of 13 books. M. Rudan's book entitled "Physics of Semiconductor Devices", published by Springer in 2015, has been downloaded 76000 times in the period 2015-2017; due to this achievement, Springer invited M.R. to prepare a second edition, published in 2018. In December 2019, the number of downloads of the two editions totalled 145000. During the covid pandemic of 2020, Springer has selected 500 titles for free access, among which the first edition of "Physics of Semiconductor Devices". On June 30, 2020 the number of downloads of the first edition has reached 2.8 million.
On July 19, 2021 the Minister of University and Research, following a proposal from the Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Information Engineering "Guglielmo Marconi", has conferred upon M. R. the title of Professor Emeritus.