Short biography

Born 14 March 1938 in Vercelli (Piemonte, Italy)

Laurea (cum laude) in Physics 1960, University of Genova; libera docenza in Theoretical Physics, 1968.

From 1961 to 1963 fellowship of INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)

From 1964 to 1980 research and teaching appointments at the universities of Genova, Bonn, Brussels and at Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.

From 1981 to 1994 full professor in Mathematical Analysys with the University of Genova and from 1995 to now full professor in Information Sciences with the same University.

Editorial Board of the journal "Inverse Problems", published by the Institute of Physics, from the foundation in 1985 to 1989.

Honorary editor of Inverse Problems from 1990 to 1994 and  member of the International Advisory Panel of the same journal from 1995 to now

Fellow of the Institute of Physics, FInstP, 2004.

Chairman of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on "Inverse Problems in Scattering and Imaging", held in Cape Code, USA, 14-19 April 1991.

Chairman of  the International Conference on Inverse Problems, sponsored by the Italian Research Council (CNR), held in Vietri, Italy, 28 September-2 October 1998.

Member of the steering committe of the conference series Applied Inverse Problems

Author and co-author of about 200 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".

My first research interests were in non-relativistic quantum scattering theory. In particular I worked on Regge pole 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 my 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, I 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 was 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. Subsequent research interests were in problems of image restoration in infrared astronomy, in microscopy and in medical imaging, including SPECT imaging and chirp-pulse microwave computed tomography. Presently I am working on the application of efficient optimization methods to large scale inverse problems with data affected by the so-called Poisson noise, namely the noise due to fluctuations in photon counting.

Member of Accademia Ligure di Scienze ed Arti.

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). .