His research interests include the synthesis of asynchronous and low-power circuits, the concurrent design of mixed hardware and software embedded systems, and the formal verification of digital systems. Lavagno has a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a coauthor of two books on asynchronous circuit design and of a book on hardware/software codesign of embedded systems. He was the architect of the POLIS project, a cooperation between UC Berkeley, Cadence Design Systems, Magneti Marelli, and Politecnico di Torino, which developed a complete hardware/software codesign environment for control-dominated embedded systems.