Vincenzo Fiorentini (Padova, Italy, 1960) is
associate professor of condensed matter physics at Cagliari University since 2001. He is the proud father of two terrific (occasionally, terrifying)
girls, Isabella, 23, and
Beatrice, 21, and with his third special girl, physicist Paola Alippi, of 12-years-old Giovanni, formerly known as "il Girino" (the tadpole; a few of (rather old) Giovanni's photos are here).
Currently he is devoting most of his time to his offsprings, trying to
keep up with his
research at the Physics Department of Cagliari University and at
the Cagliari
unit of CNR-IOM, and teaching at the Engineering and Physics schools atCagliari Uni. In the rest (?) of his time he reads and
listens to music, blogs occasionally, and has fun with Mac and
iYounameit's. He recently taken up guitar playing again after a few
decades, and is into jazz standards and improvisation (well, he'd like
to be, anyway). He occasionally observes stars and planets from his
dehors with an 8x40 binocular and a 4.5" reflector, courtesy of his
family for the 2012 birthday.
VF's siblings are Antonio, in the nautical business
(books, charts, equipment,
transfer, skippering,
...); Erna,
formerly a Heisenberg
fellow in the field of history of science and art at the Humboldt Universität
Berlin, onw at Art History, FU Berlin; Caterina, free-lance musician, teacher and -formerly- landscape geographer based in north-eastern Italy.
VF received
the laurea in Physics in 1987 at University of Trieste, Italy, with a
thesis
on double acceptor spectra in Ge with prof. A. Baldereschi.
Thereafter,
he spent over a year in the group of J. Schneider at the Fraunhofer
Institut
für Angewandte Festkoerperphysik working on acceptor and quantum-well
detector spectra. He then moved back to Trieste to work on a Ph.D.
thesis
on corrections to spectral properties in density functional theory
until
Oct 1991. After that, following a short stay at Cagliari University, he
spent 18 months in the group of M. Scheffler at the
Fritz-Haber-Institut,
Berlin, working on GaN, transition metal surfaces, and Ag surfactant
assisted
growth. Meanwhile he was appointed assistant professor at Cagliari
University,
whereto he moved in October 1993. In January 2001
he was named associate professor at the University of Messina, and
thereafter
appointed a solid state physics associate professorship at Cagliari
University. He has been (2004-08) the founding
Director of the Sardinian Laboratory for computational materials,
now a research unit of the National Research Council.
VF has worked
extensively in the physics and materials science of defects,
interfaces,
surfaces, and bulk properties of semiconductors, insulators, and
metals,
under the funding of several agencies including Regione Sardegna,
University
of Cagliari, INFM, CNR, the UE, and MURST/MIUR. He has received Humboldt scholarship
which he spent in 1998-2000 at the Walter Schottky Institut in Munich.
He also spent 6 months at Philips Research at IMEC in Leuven, Belgium as a Marie Curie invited professor.
He has been a scientific
advisor for INFM, the Max-Planck Gesellschaft, the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Italian Ministries of Industry and
Research, the Swiss, USA, Estonian and Rumanian NSFs, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Semiconductor
Division of the National Institute for Condensed Matter Physics. He
has been
a member of several conference program committees, and has
co-organized the Computational Materials Science Workshops and
Euroconferences (1994-2006) in Sardinia. He is a referee for
many journals, including Nature, PRL, PRB, and APL. He teaches
Computational Physics and, after many years of solid-state related
classes, Electromagnetism for engineering majors.