Awards
American Physical Society Fellow, 1987
Fulbright Fellow, 1997
FEL Prize, 1999
R. R. Wilson Prize, Am. Physical Society, 2001
Enrico Fermi Presidential Award, 2015, for pioneering research advancing understanding of relativistic electron beams and free-electron lasers, and for transformative discoveries profoundly impacting the successful development of the first hard x-ray free-electron laser, heralding a new era for science
Elected to the National Academy of Sciences, 2017

My area of research is electron and photon beams physics, coherent X-ray sources, particle accelerators and their applications, novel accelerators using lasers and plasmas. Within this field I am particularly interested in collective effects, instabilities, and self-organization phenomena.

My initial work at Frascati National Laboratory, was dedicated to the design and development of electron-positron colliders. I discovered the “Head-Tail effect” [1] and other collective effects strongly limiting the collider luminosity. Understanding these phenomena, and how to control them, was of crucial importance to reach for the first time the luminosity needed to obtain meaningful experimental results for high-energy physics, and to develop the standard model of elementary particles.