President of the association for scientific culture Superstripes, associated at the Institute of Crystallography of Italian National Research Council.
He has been member of the Scientific Committees of various international institutions, and of many international conferences. He is in the editorial board member of several international journals.
He has been main lecturer in many international conferences.
His main scientific interests are in local lattice fluctuations in complex materials.
He has invented the name XANES spectroscopy in 1980, having identified the key role of shape resonances in x-ray absorption spectra near the absorption edge. He has identified many body effects in core excitations of correlated electronic systems. He has resolved the local structure of active sites in metalloproteins, of complex oxides and of high temperature superconductor. In the field of high temperature superconductors he has first identified the charge carriers as holes in the oxygen orbital and the stripes scenario of local lattice fluctuations.