Marcello Calvanese Strinati is currently a research fellow at CREF in the computational photonics group. He graduated in Physics from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. He earned his Ph.D. in Physics at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa (thesis topic: Topological effects in one-dimensional quantum systems), spending the last year of his doctorate at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He was a postdoctoral student for three years at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, working on fundamental aspects of low-dimensional quantum systems in condensed matter, and paired parametric oscillator systems for computational applications (Ising machines).