I am Research Director of the INFN National Laboratories of Frascati. My career, now more than thirty years old, began in Turin where I trained by carrying out activities in the field of hadron spectroscopy.
I have worked in this sector in several experiments at CERN in Geneva and at the new FAIR facility in Darmstadt. I have also been involved in the study of nuclear systems with strangeness, hypernuclei, working and coordinating the LNF group of the FINUDA experiment, and then recently moving on to the study of dark matter with the PADME experiment.
In recent years, I have also carried out research coordination and management roles: I was deputy director of the LNF for 2 years and then head of the Research Division for 7 years. I therefore had the opportunity to realize that to produce successful scientific results it is necessary to take care of relationships between people. Research work is today more than ever a group effort in which a delicate balance must be found between the aspirations and abilities of the individual and the objectives of scientific collaborations. From my point of view, individual well-being is a necessary condition for achieving quality results. The profession of a researcher is learned in the field, often alone and without a manual. This causes difficulties and feelings of frustration to arise, especially in those who are at the beginning of their scientific journey. Listening, open and frank dialogue combined with dialectical interactions with colleagues at all levels have always been part of my way of doing research. Therefore, I enthusiastically joined the INFN Mentoring program considering it a duty to put my experience and my listening skills at the service of younger colleagues especially.