He received his Ph.D. in January 2001 from Politecnico di Milano. In 2000, 2001, and 2002 he was first visiting Ph.D. student, then visiting researcher at the Software Engineering group (code 5546) of the Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC. He held a permanent research position at the IEIIT institute of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) from December 2001 to February 2011. His research interests are mainly in formal languages and automata theory, picture languages, and formal methods for safety-critical and real time systems.