He was previously a postdoc in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University, having also spent time at the University of Illinois (Regional Economic Application Laboratory), Arizona State University (GeoDa center) and Universidad Catolica del Norte (IDEAR) following his PhD in Econometrics and Empirical Economics at "Tor Vergata" University in Rome. His research interests include spatial econometrics and statistics, regional economics, spatial hedonic models, computational methods and software development and health economics. He is also one of the developers of the R software for statistical computing. He is currently working on two libraries, one for the estimation of spatial panel data models (splm) and one for the application of GM methods in spatial econometrics (sphet).