Nicola Blefari-Melazzi
University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy, President of CNIT and of the RESTART Foundation
Nicola Blefari-Melazzi is a full Professor of Telecommunications at the University of Roma Tor Vergata, where he served as Chair of the PhD program in Telecommunications Engineering, Chair of the undergraduate and graduate programs in Telecommunications Engineering and Chair of the Department of Electronic Engineering. From January 2017 to January 2023 he has been the Director of CNIT (National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications), a non-profit Consortium made up of 41 Italian Universities. More than 1,300 people, belonging to the participating universities, collaborate with CNIT, while the number of own-employees is more than 100. Since January 2023 he is the president of CNIT.
His research projects have been funded by Italian Ministries, by the Italian National Research Council, by major companies (e.g., Ericsson, Telecom Italia), by the ESA and by the EU. He has participated in 33 EU projects, playing the role of project coordinator and PI for eight of them.
Since September 2022, he is the President of the RESTART Foundation, established primarily for the implementation, coordination and management of the research program “Telecommunications of the Future”, funded by the Italian Ministry of University with 116 M€.
He evaluated many research proposals and projects in EU programs and served as TPC member, TPC Chair, General Chair and Steering Committee Chair for IEEE Conferences and guest editor for IEEE Journals. He has been an area editor for Elsevier’s Computer Networks. He is author/co-author of about 260 papers. His research interests lie in the performance evaluation, design and control of telecommunications networks.