I am Professor and Vice-Chairman of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pisa, and I'm a teacher at the Scuola Normale Superiore of a course on "Algorithms and Complexity". I'm also the President of the first HPC Competence Center in Europe financed by Acer, hosted by University of Pisa.

I was in the Advisory Board of the Consorzio Pisa Ricerche, and scientific coordinator of Signum, a research center of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.

I got my Laurea degree (summa cum laude, 1992) and my PhD (1996) in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, and my Post-doc from the Max-Planck Institut fur Informatik (Saarbrucken, 1997-98). From 1998 to 2000, I've been Assistant Professor at the University of Pisa; and from 2000 to 2007, I've been Associate Professor at the same University. I also spent various periods of research at IBM Research center (Rome), AT&T Shannon Lab (NJ), Yahoo! Research Lab (Barcelona), University of North Texas.

My research is mainly devoted to the design, analysis and experimentation of algorithms and data structures for storing, compressing, mining and retrieving information from large amounts of textual data like Web repositories, XML file collections, textual databases, genomic/DNA sequences. My research results received one US Patent (No. 6,434,566, 13 August 2002) and some international awards: "Best Land Transportation Paper Award" from IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (1995); "EATCS Doctoral Dissertation Thesis Award" (1997); "Philip Morris Award on Science and Technology" (1997); "Research Capital award" from the University of Pisa (2002). I have four US-patents pending.

I have served as PC member of many International Conferences on Theoretical Computer Science, specifically in the field of Algorithmics. I've been co-chair of International Conference on FUN with Algorithms (2004), DIMACS Workshop on the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (2004), Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (2006), and Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (2008). I've also been plenary speaker at CPM '04 and SPIRE '05, to the next ESA/ALGO 2010, as well at various Workshops and Meetings on Algorithmics. I served as (co)editor of four special issues on the international journals: Theory of Computing Systems (June 2006), Theoretical Computer Science (November 2007), Information Retrieval (August 2008) and Theoretical Computer Science (November 2009). I have also authored one chapter on "String search in external memory: Algorithms and data structures" in the Handbook of Computational Molecular Biology (CRC Press, Editor Srinivas Aluru), one Italian book on Cryptography (Bollati Boringhieri, 2001), and I'm one of the Area Editors of the Encyclopedia of Algorithms (Springer, Editor Ming-Yang Kao).

I (co-)authored more than 100 publications in international refereed conferences and journals on Theoretical Computer Science and Algorithmics. A (partial) list of them is available at the CS Bibliographic Database, or via the ACM Digital Library.