Course Professor
Prof. Luciano Lenzini
He received his degree in Physics from the University of Pisa in 1969 and began his research career at CNUCE, where he worked from 1970 to 1994 on the design and development of pioneering computer networks.
In 1994, he left CNUCE, where he held the position of Research Director, following his appointment as Full Professor at the University of Pisa. From 2005 to 2011, he also served as a part-time Visiting Professor at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, an international graduate institution dedicated to the integration of research, education, and innovation. In this role, he contributed to the development and organization of the school’s research and educational activities.
During the early stages of computer networking research, Professor Lenzini contributed to several pioneering national and international projects. Between 1973 and 1974, he worked at the IBM Cambridge Scientific Center (Massachusetts), gaining expertise in computer network architectures and protocols at a time when packet-switching technologies were still emerging.
He subsequently conceived and directed the design and implementation of major Italian and European networking projects, including RPCNET, the first Italian packet-switching network; STELLA, the first European satellite-based packet network; and OSIRIDE, one of the earliest large-scale implementations of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. He also conceived and directed the project that led to the activation of the first Internet node in Italy, developed in cooperation with Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn.
He has been deeply involved in the international research community through scientific committees, editorial boards, and major conference organizations. He served as General Chair of several international workshops and conferences, including the IEEE Workshop on Metropolitan Area Networks, the European Wireless conferences, and the ValueTools 2006 conference, of which he was a co-founder. He was also Chairman of the Italian Group on Quantitative Methods in Informatics.
His research activities have spanned a broad range of topics, including computer networking architectures and protocols, Internet evolution and performance analysis, wireless and mobile systems, Quality of Service, distributed systems, and quantitative methods for network analysis. More recently, his interests have focused on quantum computing and the emerging quantum Internet.
Professor Lenzini has coordinated and participated in numerous national and European research projects funded by organizations such as the European Space Agency and the European Union. His collaborations with industrial partners, including IBM, Nokia and Telecom Italia, led to the development of innovative resource-allocation algorithms and several international patents.
He has taught advanced courses in computer networking, advanced network architectures and protocols, and performance evaluation for many years at the University of Pisa. He has supervised numerous graduate students and PhD researchers and has delivered invited lectures and seminars at universities, research centers, and industrial laboratories worldwide.
In 2013, he retired from the University of Pisa, but he has continued to collaborate with the university both in research activities, particularly in the field of quantum Internet, and in teaching. Starting from the academic year 2024/2025, he introduced and has been teaching, for the first time ever at the School of Engineering of the University of Pisa, a course entitled Quantum Computing and Quantum Internet for master’s degree students in Computer Engineering (Laurea Magistrale in Ingegneria Informatica). The students have reacted very enthusiastically to the course, as demonstrated by their steadily increasing number and by the excellent results achieved during the examinations.
