After earning my PhD in Physics from the University of Bologna in 2014 and spending four years at CERN in Geneva (2012–2016), I returned to Bologna, where I currently hold the position of Associate Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Within the ATLAS collaboration, I pursue a research line that combines precision measurements — from the top-quark cross-section to the properties of the Higgs boson — with studies of exotic physics, where I have coordinated analyses focused on heavy neutrinos of type I/III and vector-like leptons, developing reconstruction algorithms for boosted topologies or for hadronic decay chains involving muons.
In parallel, I have specialized in quantum computing. Since 2025, I have been part of the QUART&T (Quantum Architectures for Theory & Technology) project, leading the Bologna unit in the development of superconducting-qubit demonstrators with all-to-all connectivity and of qudits based on Josephson junctions in resonant cavities, as well as the design of RF-SoC electronics for read-out. Within this framework, I contributed to QUnfold, an open-source tool that reformulates the statistical unfolding problem as a QUBO and solves it via quantum annealing hardware.
My interest in quantum computing complements an active role in machine learning and high-performance computing (HPC). I am co-author of FastCaloGANtainer, a framework that enables the training of GANs for fast ATLAS calorimeter simulation on supercomputers such as Leonardo-CINECA and CNAF-HPC, reducing training times by a factor of three to four on A100 multi-GPU nodes. I also contribute to the development of neural networks for boosted jet identification and anomaly detection in searches for new physics, exploring graph models and diffusion models in preparation for the HL-LHC.
I am also a member of the FOOT collaboration, which measures fragmentation cross-sections of light nuclei for hadron therapy and space radiation protection. In this context, I work on the implementation of a Kalman Filter algorithm for track reconstruction and on data analysis.
