Curriculum

Associate professor @ Dipartimento di Fisica – Politecnico di Milano

Download my curriculum vitae here in PDF format.

SHORT CV

I am an Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano working on novel materials and phenomena related to spin-orbit physics (spin-orbitronics), research motivated by the willingness to exploit the spin of carriers in innovative electronic devices beyond CMOS.

I started my career with a PhD in semiconductor spintronics. I explored the physics of optical spin orientation and spin transport in germanium. I developed efficient spin-photodiodes that detect the degree of light helicity by spin filtering (Adv. Mater. 2012). As a visiting researcher at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Republic (Prof. T. Jungwirth), I contributed to the field of antiferromagnetic spintronics with a seminal study on CuMnAs, laying the ground to the all-electric read and write of antiferromagnets (Nature Commun. 2013).

Afterwards, I invested my energies towards the combination of ferroelectricity and spin physics, to seek the electrical controllability of either magnetism or spin transport. I contributed to the classic, non-volatile electric control of magnetization in artificial multiferroics (Nature Commun. 2014, Adv. Electron. Mater. 2016). I was able to set my independent research path on the development of spin-textured ferroelectrics as ferroelectric Rashba semiconductors. I authored the first spectroscopic investigation of germanium telluride (Adv. Mater. 2016). I demonstrated that those materials allow for an unprecedented non-volatile, electric control of bulk Rashba spin-texture (Nano Lett. 2018) and spin-to-charge conversion in silicon-compatible semiconductors (Nature Electr. 2021). Such discoveries open a brand new field and give birth to a new class of devices beyond CMOS, capable of memory and spin-based computing with ultralow power consumption for the electronics of the next decades.

Updated on September 2023.

PERSONAL INFORMATION

Born in Como, 31/07/1984
Civil status: married, two children

PUBLICATIONS

ORCID:          orcid.org/0000-0001-6930-211X
Scopus ID:    36545363200
Research ID:    A-5686-2018

EDUCATION

2003: Diploma (Perito industriale) in Computer Science (mark 100/100 cum laude)
2009: Master degree in Physics Engineering at Politecnico di Milano (mark 110/100 cum laude)
2013: Ph.D. in Physics at Politecnico di Milano, cum laude (top 5% of the students)

PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS

  • 2012 Visiting Ph.D. at the Institute of Physics – Academy of Science of Czech Republic in the group of Prof. Thomas Jungwirth
  • 2013-2016  Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Physics, Politecnico di Milano (Italy)
  • 10/2016-11/2019 Fixed-term “Junior” Researcher (RTDA), Polifab – Dipartimento di Fisica – Politecnico di Milano
  • From 12/2019 Fixed-term “Senior” Researcher (RTDB), Polifab – Dipartimento di Fisica – Politecnico di Milano
  • 12/2022 Associate professor – Polifab – Dipartimento di Fisica – Politecnico di Milano

GRANTS

2023 – 2025    Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (MUR), PRIN, “Spin-ORBit Effects in Two-dimensional magnets (SORBET)”. 260 k€ | Unit coordinator and work package leader

2023 – 2025    Partenariato Infrastrutture  – Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza (PNRR) – 5 M€ | Responsible for an ultra-high vacuum cluster tool (MBE+ARPES, 1.5 M€)

2021 – 2022    Spanish National Research Council, “Electrocaloric effects in CMOS compatible ferroelectric oxides for cooling application”. Unit coordinator. Funding 24 k€

2019 – 2023    Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (MUR), PRIN, “Towards ferroelectricity in two-dimensions (TWEET)”. 650 k€ | Unit coordinator and work package leader. Website: https://tweet.spin.cnr.it

2018 – 2019     Cariplo Foundation and Regione Lombardia, Cariplo ERC, “Electric Control Of Spin transport in ferroelectric Rashba semiconductors” (ECOS). 120 k€ | Principal investigator

2014-2019      Three granted beamtimes for spin and angular resolved photoemission spectroscopy at the Elettra Synchrotron Radiation Facility (APE beamline), Trieste, Italy. Principal investigator

AUTHOR RECORD

59 publications in peer-reviewed journals [including 1 Nature Electronics, 3 Adv. Mater., 2 Nature Commun., 1 Nano Letters, 1 Phys. Rev. Lett., 3 Adv. Mater. family, 1 single-author paper, 1 invited APL Mater.]; H-index: 17 (Scopus/WoS), 19 (Google Scholar); ~900 citations (excluding self-citations).

11 publications as first author, 12 as a corresponding author; 19 publications without my PhD supervisor despite we work at the same facility; 3 as leading (last) author (one is a Nature Electronics).