I am currently Tenured Associate Professor at the Physics Department of Cagliari University, and responsible of the local INFN (National Institute of Nuclear Physics) initiative for the gravitational waves research and detection. I am currently teaching Advanced Quantum Field, General relativity, and Fundamental Physics. 

In the past, I held the position of Associate Professor at Fudan University (2012 - 2016), and at the Southern University of Science and Technology (2016 - 2024). 

In April 2023, I officially received the prestigious "direct call for clear fame and scientific merits" from the Italian Ministry of University and Research to return to Italy as a Professor. 

I published 112 papers and the number of citations amounts to 8317, h-index about 50 (from inspire), of which 1 ``very famous paper''  with 587 citations, and 2 ``famous paper'' with 472 and 314 citations (from inspire),  19 ``very well-known papers‘' with more then 100 citations (from inspire), 30 ``well-known papers’' with more then 50 citations (from inspire). 

I am coauthor of the book: ``Nonlocal Quantum Gravity" by Cambridge University Press, G. Calcagni and L. Modesto, which will be published soon. 

Editor of the ``Handbook of Quantum Gravity'' together with Prof. Cosimo Bambi and Prof. Ilya L. Shapiro, by Springer 2024 that got the China New Development Awards 2025. 

Stanford University Names World's Top 2 % Scientists: from 2019 to 2025. 

Top Italian Scientists in the world. 

I am a theoretical physicist whose interests are:  
quantum field theory, quantum gravity, classical and quantum black holes, physics beyond the standard model of particle physics, theoretical astrophysics, gravitational waves, dark matter and dark energy issues, cosmology, and the confinement problem in gauge gravitational theories.

I am mainly concerned with the study of different approaches to quantum gravity: (i) weakly nonlocal gravitational and gauge theories, (ii) general local higher derivative theories with particular interest to theories “alla" Lee-Wick and Stelle's gravity, (iii) string theory, (iv) non-perturbative quantum gravity, (v) nonlocal and higher derivative extension of the standard model of particle physics. 

In the last fifteen years my research has been concerned with the following fundamental question: is it possible to find a renormalizable and unitary theory of gravity within the quantum field theory framework? Based of the results obtained and consolidated in the past years, the answer is affirmative. Indeed, we have now a class of gravitational field theories (including the coupling to matter) compatible with perturbative renormalizability (or finiteness) and unitarity regardless of the spacetime dimension.  

In the past, I earned my Ph.D in "string theory" introducing a new supersymmetric formalism for D-branes. Afterwards, I moved to work in a non-perturbative approach to "quantum gravity". In particular, I have applied non perturbative ideas coming from "loop quantum gravity" to the black hole physics, including phenomenology. 
Finally, in the last fourteen years, I re-discovered and developed a class of gravitational theories (local and nonlocal) compatible with unitarity and super-renormalizability or finiteness at perturbative level. These theories will play a crucial role not only for gravity, but also for all the other fundamental interactions. In particular, the tools recently developed will have implications and applications to general theories beyond Einstein's gravity and beyond the standard model of particle physics, cosmology, gravitational waves, and black hole physics. 

CV aggiornato al Marzo 2026.