Dipartimento di Informatica e Scienze dell'Informazione
From 1964 to 1980 he held research and teaching appointments at the universities of Genova, Bonn, Brussels and at Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. In 1981 he became full professor in Mathematics at the University of Genova and from 1995 he is full professor in Information Science at the same University.
He was Honorary Editor of the journal "Inverse Problems", published by the Institute of Physics, from 1990 to 1994 and is currently member of the International Advisory Panel of the same journal.
He organized a NATO Advanced Research Workshop on "Inverse Problems in Scattering and Imaging", held in Cape Code, USA, 14-19 April 1991, and an International Conference on Inverse Problems, sponsored by the Italian Research Council (CNR), held in Vietri, Italy, 28 September-2 October 1998.
He is author and co-author of about 100 articles, co-editor, with E.R.Pike, of the book "Inverse Problem in Scattering and Imaging" and co-author with P.Boccacci of the book "Introduction to Inverse Problems in Imaging".
His first research interests were in non-relativistic quantum scattering theory. In particular he worked on Regge poles theory and on its applications to nuclear physics, on spectral properties of Schroedinger operators with nonlocal potentials and on some mathematical problems arising in the optical model of nuclear reactions. Around 1975 his interest was addressed to another research domain which was new at that time: the theory and the applications of inverse and ill-posed problems. After some preliminary work on deterministic and probabilistic regularization methods and on their applications to the problem of object restoration in optics, he developed methods based on the singular value decomposition of a linear operator for the solution of inverse problems in various domains of applied science. In particular, properties of the singular system of the finite Laplace transform were derived and used for data inversion in the problem of polydispersity analysis by means of photon correlation spectroscopy. Moreover, applications of the theory to imaging problems in microscopy suggested a new version of the confocal scanning microscope. A prototype of this new microscope has been recently realized by E.R.Pike at King's College in London. Other applications were to particle sizing in the micron and submicron region by light scattering, to microwave thermography, seismic tomography and astrophysics. His more recent research interests are in problems of image restoration in infrared astronomy and in medical imaging, in particular in chirp-pulse microwave computed tomography.
He is an individual member of SIAM (Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics), UMI (the Italian Mathematical Society), SIMAI (the Italian Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics) and SIF (the Italian Physical Society). He is also a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and of Accademia Ligure di Scienze ed Arti.