Advisor Board

Roberto Cingolani was appointed Chief Executive Officer and General Manager of Leonardo S.p.a. on 9 May 2023.

He was born in Milan on 23 December 1961.

In 1985, he graduated from the University of Bari with a degree in Physics. In 1989, he was awarded a PhD (“Diploma di Perfezionamento”) in Physics at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.

He was a staff member at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart (Germany) and a Visiting Professor at Tokyo University (Japan) and Virginia Commonwealth University (USA).

Since 1991, he was a Professor of Physics at the University of Salento (Lecce), where he was appointed Full Professor of Experimental Physics in 2000.

In 2001, he founded the National Nanotechnology Laboratory (NNL) of INFN (Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica della Materia) in Lecce.

In 2006, he founded the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) of which he was Scientific Director and Chief Executive Officer until his appointment as Chief Technology & Innovation Officer of Leonardo in 2019.

In February 2021, he was appointed Minister for the Ecological Transition in Mario Draghi’s Italian Government.

Since 2023, he has been a Senior Board Director of the NATO Innovation Fund.

Roberto Cingolani was bestowed with three titles of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic: “Alfiere del Lavoro” in 1981, “Commendatore della Repubblica” in 2006 and “Grand Ufficiale al merito della Repubblica Italiana” in 2021. He is author and co-author of more than 1,100 publications in international journals and holds over 100 patents.