CEO, Leonardo, Italy
Roberto Cingolani is Chief Executive Officer and General Manager of Leonardo S.p.a. He is also Senior Board Director of the NATO Innovation Fund, established by NATO countries to promote technological innovation in defence and security. He graduated in Physics from the University of Bari and was awarded a PhD in Physics at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. He had an extensive scientific and academic career: from 1988 to 1991, he was staff member at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, Germany; since 1991, he was a Professor of Physics at the University of Salento; in 1996, he was a Visiting Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, USA; in 1997, he was a Visiting Professor at Tokyo University, Japan. He was appointed Full Professor of Experimental Physics in 2000. In 2001, he founded the National Nanotechnology Laboratory (NNL) of the National Institute for Physics of Matter (INFM) in Lecce (Italy) and, in 2006, was appointed Scientific Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), a public/private Foundation constituted jointly by the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of University and Research to develop applied research and technology transfer programmes of strategic interest for the national industry. In IIT, from 2006 until 2018, he developed an interdisciplinary research strategy merging robotics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and nanotechnology, with a staff of approximately 1,900 people from 60 countries and 60000 sqm facilities, generating a portfolio of more than 800 national and international patents and over 30 start-up companies. In 2019, he was appointed the Chief Technology & Innovation Officer of Leonardo, in charge of R&D, Innovation strategies, Digitalization and Sustainability. In February 2021, he was appointed Minister for the Ecological Transition in Mario Draghi’s Government, responsible for the Environment, Climate and Energy policy and of the related Mission within the National Plan of Recovery and Resiliency. Roberto Cingolani is author and co-author of more than 1,100 papers in international journals and holds over 100 patents in the fields of Materials Science, Semiconductor Technologies, Nanotechnologies, Chemistry of Materials, Sensor Technologies, Optoelectronics and Photonics, Robotics. He won multiple awards in Science and Technology domains and was bestowed three titles of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic: “Alfiere del Lavoro “in 1981, “Commendatore della Repubblica” in 2006, “Grand Ufficiale al merito della Repubblica Italiana” in 2021.
