I was an undergraduate at the University of Pisa, Italy, where I gained a Laurea (MSci) in Physics in 2001, graduating with a project on fundations of General Relativity carried out at Turin's Politecnico. Between 2001 and 2004 I took a PhD in Theoretical Physics (quantum optics and quantum information) under Fabrizio Illuminati and Silvio De Siena at the University of Salerno. During my PhD studies, I spent half a year at Potsdam Institut fuer Physik, under the supervision of Jens Eisert, and half a year at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, under the supervision of Yvan Castin.In 2004-2005, I spent one year as a Research Assistant in the AMOPP group at University College London, working with Sougato Bose in Quantum Information, after which I joined the Quantum Information Group of Martin Plenio at Imperial College (Institute of Mathematical Physics and Department of Physics) as a Marie Curie Fellow, from November 2005 until September 2007. In October 2007 I came back to UCL as a lecturer, re-joining the Quantum Information Group (within the AMOPP and TAMPA groups).