Personal Profile

I was born and bred in a small town in the outer skirt of Rome, Italy and the cradle of the Roman Empire, which makes a perfect balance between small town values and good exposure to the city life and culture. The concurrence of these factors has provided me the opportunity to keep in touch with the agricultural heritage of my ancestors while being exposed to the intellectual circles of my parents. For example, there were summer days in my childhood that I started helping my grandmother and her sisters attend to their gardens, and they ended up at dinner with entrepreneurs, managers, politician, academics, and intellectuals with discussions on topics ranging from theology to quantum-physics. The aforementioned exposure to a various cultural environment since childhood enabled me to acquire a comprehensive set of interest; therefore, they have provided me with the tools needed to relate with politics, academic and industrial worlds which often speak different languages. My experience on both industry and academic research provides me with the skill-set required to build bridges between these two processes.

The aim in this chapter of my life is to pay back the world the opportunity it has provided me. I believe that a determinant ability of a successful leader based on my interpretation of both Machiavelli and Sun Tzu is the stoic principle of sacrifice for the greater good. This part of their portrait of a good leader is often overlooked because it does not fit in the narrative self-serving strategies, which are the base of the liberal capitalism. Instead, I am more of an ethical capitalist that believes in the balance between giving to and receiving from the community, and I am inspired by the example of Adriano Olivetti that lead to the development of the first personal computer.

While I am more driven towards an academic research career and become a professor in the next years to come, I do not preclude industry-related and entrepreneurship opportunities.