Attività Professionale

• 30 ottobre 2020 - : professore associato, Sapienza Università di Roma.

• 1 giugno 2016 - 29 ottobre 2020: professore (W2), RWTH Aachen, Aquisgrana, Germania.

• Giugno 2015 - maggio 2018: professore aggiunto, Università di Xi’an Jiaotong, Cina.

• 15 dicembre 2009 - 31 maggio 2016: professore junior, RWTH Aachen, Aquisgrana, Germania.

• 1 dicembre 2008 - 31 dicembre 2009: ricercatore postdoc, ETH Zurich, USI-Campus, Lugano, Svizzera.

• 1 settembre 2004 - 30 novembre 2008: ricercatore postdoc, SISSA, Trieste.

• 1 settembre 2004 - 30 novembre 2006: Visiting Scientist, ICTP, Trieste.

Formazione

• 9 giugno 2004: dottorato in fisica, Università di Amburgo, Germania.

• 9 febbraio 2000: laurea in fisica, Università di Genova.

Finanziamenti

• CoPI of the PNRR project “Multi-disciplinary approach to multiscale modeling and its engineering applications” within CN1 - Spoke 6. Funding for our project: 181 kEUR

• Principal investigator of the PRIN 2020 project “NEuroMorPHic devices bASed on chalcogenIde heteroStructures (EMPHASIS)”. Total funding: 701 kEUR

• Principal investigator of three DFG (German Research Foundation) research grants within the Collaborative Research Center SFB 917 “Resistively Switching Chalcogenides for Future Electronics - Structure, Kinetics, and Device Scalability”, 2011-2023. Title of my projects: “Crystallization Kinetics in Phase-Change Materials” (2011-2015), “Disruption and formation of resonant bonds in phase-change materials: from aging of the amorphous phase to hidden states in the crystal” (2015-2019), “Exploring the impact of bonding on switching kinetics” (2019-2020). Total funding for my group: 700 kEUR

• Principal investigator of the DFG research grant “Experimental and theoretical studies of phase-change Ge-Sb-Te alloys in the liquid state”, 2013-2016. Total funding for my group: 169.7 kEUR

• CSC (China Scholarship Council) scholarship for a Ph. D. position on liquid-liquid phase transitions in phase-change materials, 2020-2023 (funding: 48 kEUR)

• CSC (China Scholarship Council) scholarship for a Ph. D. position on computational screening of Anderson insulators, 2018-2021 (funding: 48 kEUR)

• RWTH scholarship for a PhD position on ”Ab Initio Simulations of Switching Processes in Chalcogenide Superlattices”, 2017-2020 (funding: 50 kEUR)

• JARA-FIT Seed Fund “Defects in graphene quantum dots”, 2014-2015 (funding: 46.9 kEUR)

• JARA-FIT Seed Fund “Large-scale density-functional-theory study of localization of donor electrons in phosphorus-doped silicon”, 2013-2014 (funding: 49.5 kEUR)

• DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) grant for a Ph. D. position on first-principles simulations of phase-change materials, 2011-2014 (funding: 36 kEUR) 

Computing time

• “Ab initio simulations of phase-change heterostructures (SIMPCH)”, 2022-2023. Total cpu time granted on the Galileo100 Cineca cluster: 0.72 × 106 core hours

• “Atomistic study of the potential energy surface and the configurational entropy of the phase-change material GeTe (EntroPiC)”, 2021-2022. Total cpu time granted on the Galileo100 Cineca cluster: about 1 × 106 core hours.

• JARA-HPC project “Ab-initio study of the inherent structures and the configurational entropy of liquid phase-change materials”, 2020-2021. Total cpu time granted on the Claix cluster at RWTH Aachen: 16.35 × 106 core hours.

• JARA-HPC project “Ab-initio study of defects in phase-change materials”, 2020-2021. Total cpu time granted on the Claix cluster at RWTH Aachen: 11.85 × 106 core hours.

• JARA-HPC project “Ab initio study of liquid-liquid phase transitions in semiconductors and phase-change materials”, 2019-2020. Total cpu time granted on the Claix cluster at RWTH Aachen: 7.5 × 106 core hours.

• JARA-HPC project “Ab initio investigation of the structure-dynamics relation in phase-change materials”, 2019-2020. Total cpu time granted on the Claix cluster at RWTH Aachen: 7.8 × 106 core hours.

• JARA-HPC project “Ab initio study of the electronic and kinetic properties of clean and Scandium-alloyed Sb2Te3”, 2018-2019. Total cpu time granted on the Claix cluster at RWTH Aachen: 5.1 × 106  core hours.

• JARA-HPC project “Ab initio study of interfacial phase-change materials and thin chalcogenides”, 2016-2018. Total cpu time granted on the Claix cluster at RWTH Aachen: 9.5 × 106 core hours.

• JARA-HPC project “Ab initio study of magnetic impurities, chains and monolayers on the topological insulator Sb2Te3”, 2016-2017. Total cpu time granted on the Claix cluster at RWTH Aachen: 5 × 106 core hours.

• JARA-HPC project “Ab initio study of physical aging of amorphous GeSbTe alloys and doped Sb2Te alloys”, 2015-2016. Total cpu time granted on the Bull cluster at RWTH Aachen: 4 × 106 core hours.

• JARA-HPC project “Defects and magnetism in Graphene nanostructures”, 2014-2016. Total cpu time granted on the Bull cluster at RWTH Aachen: 5.7 × 106 core hours.

• JARA-HPC project “Ab initio simulations of amorphous phase-change materials”, 2014-2015. Total cpu time granted on the Bull cluster at RWTH Aachen: 3.0 × 106 core hours.

• JARA-HPC project “Simulations of crystallization of phase-change alloys at the crystal-amorphous interface”, 2013-2014. Total cpu time granted on the Bull cluster at RWTH Aachen: 3.0 × 106 core hours.

• JARA-HPC project “Magnetic and electronic properties of Graphene nanostructures grown on various surfaces”, 2012-2013. Total cpu time granted on the Bull cluster at RWTH Aachen: 2.2 × 106 core hours.

• NIC project “Anderson localization in crystalline Ge2Sb2Te5”, 2011-2013. Total cpu time granted on the JUROPA cluster at FZ Jülich: approx. 0.5 × 106 core hours. 

Pubblicazioni e riassunto dei risultati scientifici

(updated to 28.01.2023; Researcher ID: G-4502-2014)

• Articles published in international peer-reviewed journals: 90, including papers in Science (4), Nature Materials (3), Nature Reviews Materials (1), Advanced Materials (8), Nature Communications (2), Physical Review Letters (5), Angewandte Chemie (1), Nano Energy (1), Advanced Functional Materials (1), NPJ Computational Materials (1)

• Book chapters: 2

Total Citations: 22460 (Web of Science)

Average Citations per Product: 252.360 (Web of Science)

Hirsch (H) index:  32 (Web of Science)

Normalized H index*: 32 (H Index)/22 (Academic seniority) = 1.454 (Web of Science)

Attività di ricerca

He is a recognized expert in computational solid state physics, nanoscience and surface science. His current research has a strong focus on emerging applications in information technology, which hold the promise of overcoming the limitations in terms of speed, scalability and energy consumption of present-day memories and processors. His main interest are phase-change materials (PCMs) for applications in data-storage devices and neuromorphic computing. He has made seminal contributions to the understanding of the physical properties of conventional PCMs and the development of novel PCMs with superior switching kinetics. He was a developer of the Quantum Espresso package, a suite of codes for electronic-structure calculations and materials modeling at the nanoscale based on density functional theory. He also contributed to the fields of two-dimensional materials, topological insulators, transport in monatomic chains, Anderson localization and weak localization, and self-assembled monolayers of organic molecules on metallic surfaces.

Invited Talks and Lectures

37 invited seminars at universities and research institutes

35 invited talks and lectures at international conferences and schools, including: Nature conference (2012), Spring Meeting of the Materials Research Society (2014), “Total Energy” conference (2015), EPCOS conference (2017) 

Organizzazione di conferenze, attività editoriale e di referaggio  

• MRS Symposium “Phase-Change Materials and Applications” held at the 2016 MRS Spring Meeting, Phoenix (USA). Role: Head of the organizing committee 

• MRS Symposium “Phase-Change Materials for Memory, Reconfigurable Electronics and Cognitive Applications” held at the 2015 MRS Spring Meeting, San Francisco (USA). Role: Member of the organizing committee  

• JARA-FIT Nanoelectronics Days 2010, Aachen, October 2010. Role: Member of the steering committee  

• Since 2015, I am serving as an Editor for Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing Group) in the field of Condensed Matter Physics 

• Guest Editor for the September 2019 issue of MRS Bulletin focused on the theme topic “Phase-change materials for data storage and memory applications” 

• Referee for Science, Nature Materials, Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, Advanced Functional Materials, Scientific Reports, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review B, The Journal of Physical Chemistry, Computer Physics Communications, Physica Status Solidi, Surface Science

Awards, honours and society memberships

• Italian National Scientific Habilitation (ASN 2017). Full Professor Habilitation in Theoretical Solid State Physics (02/B2), 2017- 2023

• Adjunct Professorship, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China (2015-2018)

• GIAN course given at IIT Indore (India), February 5-16, 2018 (title: “Fundamentals of solid state physics: from theoretical and computational concepts to recent applications in information technology”)

• Award for outstanding presentation, EPCOS conference (2014)

Supervisione degli studenti

• Main supervisor of 10 PhD students (7 students at RWTH Aachen University, 3 students at Sapienza University), second supervisor of one PhD student at RWTH Aachen (2010-present)

• Main supervisor of 10 master’s theses at RWTH Aachen University (2010-present)

• Main supervisor of 10 bachelor’s theses at RWTH Aachen University (2010-present)

Insegnamento

• Insegnamento di corsi obbligatori alla Sapienza Università di Roma: Meccanica (corso della triennale per studenti di fisica), Fisica (corso della triennale per studenti di ingegneria gestionale; ho tenuto questo corso 2 volte), Laboratorio di Calcolo (corso della triennale per studenti di fisica; di questo corso sono stato esercitatore).

• Insegnamento di corsi obbligatori all'RWTH Aachen: Theoretical Solid State Physics (corso di master in inglese; ho tenuto questo corso 6 volte), Computational Physics (corso di master in inglese; ho tenuto questo corso 3 volte), Theoretical Physics III - Quantum Mechanics (corso di bachelor in tedesco)

• Insegnamento di corsi facoltativi all'RWTH Aachen: Density Functional Theory and Electronic Structure, Theory of Disordered Systems, Advanced Solid State Physics, Electronic Structure I 

Altre attività 

• Since March 2021: Academics Coordinator and Supervisor for International Mobility at the Department of Physics at Sapienza University

• June 2016 – October 2020: Theory Coordinator at the Department of Physics at RWTH Aachen University. Among other duties, I was in charge of organizing the teaching of the bachelor’s and master’s theoretical physics courses.

• In 2014-2015 I was involved in the preparation of the proposal for a new high-performance computer cluster “Cluster Aix-la-Chapelle (Claix)” at RWTH Aachen (the Chairman was Prof. Dr. Matthias Müller). I also acted as representative of the Departments of Physics and Chemistry during the evaluation. The funding of the project was approved in 2015 (total funding: 21.6 million EUR).