Francesco Ciccarello is an Associate Professor of Physics of Matter (FIS/03) and holds the Italian National Scientific Habilitation as Full Professor in Theoretical Physics of Matter (02B2) and Theoretical Physics of fundamental interactions (02A2).  In 2016, he was awarded a prestigious Fulbright research scholarship which was spent at Duke University, USA. He was a postdoctoral research associate at Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa (2011-2012) and a visiting research fellow at Queen’s University Belfast, UK (2008) and Stanford University, USA (2019). He is a member of the Editorial Board of Quantum, Journal of the Optical Society of America B, Entropy, Plos One, Journal of Physics Communications. He authored about 70 papers published in various journals, including Physical Review Letters, Optica, Physics Reports, Nanophotonics, Quantum Science and Technology and Nature Communications. He is expert in open quantum systems, quantum optics and condensed matter. His current research is mostly focused on waveguide QED, an emerging area across quantum optics and condensed matter, where he is the main organizer of a series of dedicated workshops and which studies quantum emitters coupled to engineered photonic structures (e.g. waveguides or lattices with topological or non-Hermitan properties).