I'm an associate professor of mathematics at the School of Mathematical Sciences at Hebei Normal University (HebNU), where I've been since Feb 2019. This term (FW 2019‒20), I'm teaching ‘Introduction to Number Theory’ (BS degree in mathematics), ‘Combinatorics’ (MS and PhD degrees in mathematics), and ‘Scientific Writing’ (MS and PhD degrees in mathematics and CS). Last term (SS 2018‒19), I taught ‘Graph theory’ (MS and PhD degrees in mathematics and CS). Next term (SS 2019‒20), I'll teach ‘Number Theory’ (BS degree in mathematics) and ‘Graph theory’ (MS and PhD degrees in mathematics and CS).

I co-organize the Open Seminar, a seminar series primarily addressed to grads and senior undergrads that covers a wide range of topics in pure and applied mathematics. In my not-so-much spare time, I enjoy traveling and hiking, singing karaoke, and playing volleyball and badminton with colleagues and students.

Research. I'm mainly interested in

• number theory, with emphasis on additive combinatorics and elementary number theory;


• factorization theory, that is, the study of various questions naturally arising from the possibility or impossibility of extending the fundamental theorem of arithmetic to rings and, more generally, monoids.

However, I also enjoy musing on other things, including classical analysis, discrete mathematics, functional equations, and group/semigroup theory.

Academic timeline. Before arriving at HebNU, I moved around quite a bit. In some detail, I was

• a visiting researcher (Jan‒Feb 2019) and a Lise Meitner fellow (Mar 2016‒Feb 2018) at the Institute for Mathematics and Scientific Computing ‒ University of Graz, where, as a member of the AlgNTh group, I worked mostly on the interplay between additive combinatorics and factorization theory under the guidance of Alfred Geroldinger (and in the good company of Austrian wine);


• a visiting professor at the Center for Combinatorics, Nankai University (10 Sept‒9 Dec 2018), where I joined the group of Weidong Gao and delivered a cycle of lectures (addressed to MS and PhD students in mathematics) on power monoids and factorization;


• a lecturer at University of Graz (Mar‒Aug 2018), where I taught ‘Additive Combinatorics and Applications’ to MS and PhD students in mathematics;


• a postdoc (Nov 2015‒Feb 2016 and 8 Jan‒7 July 2014) at the Centre de Mathématiques Laurent Schwartz (CMLS), École Polytechnique, in the frame of the ANR project CAESAR and under the lead of Alain Plagne;


• a postdoc (Nov 2015‒Oct 2016) at the Qatari campus of Texas A&M University, where I joined the team of Catherine H. Yan and Rudolph ‘Rudy’ Lorentz to work on parking functions and ‘umbral polynomials’ (and what a fantastic experience it was!).

I hold a PhD in mathematics, obtained from the Université de Lyon ‒ Jean Monnet campus under the advisorship of Alain Plagne and François Hennecart. I defended my thesis (‘Some Questions in Combinatorial and Elementary Number Theory’) in Nov 2013.

All this comes after an Intra-European Fellowship (from the Marie Curie Actions program) I was awarded in Dec 2010: The grant financed an individual project of 24 months (May 2011‒Apr 2013), carried out at the Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions ‒ UPMC, Sorbonne Universités under the supervision of Yvon Maday and essentially aimed at a career shift (before moving to France, I had got a PhD in computational electromagnetics at Università Mediterranea under the guidance of Giovanni Angiulli and worked for many years in the same research field).

Trivia. I have a younger sister, Margherita, and two wonderful nieces, Anjana (born May 9, 2017) and Yunha (born Feb 23, 2019), who live in Paris. I own a small farm, run by my parents, Angelo and Vittoria, in the countryside of my hometown, in the far south of Italy. And I've been reading ‘Il nome della rosa’ at least once a year since I was 15.