Leonardo Merola

Biography

Born in Naples (Italy) in 1952, Leonardo Merola is involved in experimental particle physics research since 1975 when he got his degree in Physics. Researcher from 1982 to 1987, associate professor from 1987 to 2000, since then full professor of Experimental Physics at the Naples University Federico II.
At present he teaches Nuclear and Subnuclear Physics (Laurea triennale in Fisica) and Particle Physics at advanced level for the Master Diploma in Physics (Laurea magistrale in Fisica). In recent years he taught also Electromagnetism and Optics, Grid computing and Geometrical optics.

A) Scientific research in Particle Physics.

Co-author of more than 600 scientific publications, his main experience covers data acquisition, computing and software, data analysis in the field of Higgs boson research, electroweak precision measurements.
He participated in experiments at the CERN colliders to study proton-proton collisions at 44 and 63 GeV (exp. R209 at the ISR), proton-antiproton up to 630 GeV (exp. UA4 at the ppbar collider), electron-positron up to more than 200 GeV c.m. energy (exp. L3 at LEP).
He was involved in the search for matter-antimatter symmetry violation at the DAFNE electron-positron collider at the INFN Frascati National Laboratory (exp. KLOE) and has been the group leader of the Naples group which participated in the L3 experiment at CERN LEP. In detail, his fields of research were Standard Model Physics and search for Higgs boson.
At present he is a member of the international ATLAS collaboration for the study of proton-proton collisions at 14 TeV c.m. energy which is in operation at the CERN LHC Large Hadron Collider since 2009.

B) Technology transfer and social impact activities.

Since many years he has been devoting his attention to the study of distributed physics analysis using grid computing technologies.
At present he is the project leader of the MIUR PON R&C 2007-2013 project “RECAS” (Computing network for the SuperB experiment and other scientific and industrial communities); four datacenters in the South of Italy (Napoli, Bari, Cosenza Catania) will be implemented for grid/cloud computing services to scientific research and Industry.
He also participated in UE (EGEE), MIUR (CAMPUS-GRID, SCOPE) projects for the implementation of high energy physics simulations and data analysis over wide area networks.

C) Management activities.

At present:
President of the Scientific Committee of the University of Naples “SCOPE” Datacenter;
Member of the Academy of Science (Società Nazionale Scienze Lettere e Arti) in Naples.
Member of the Academic Senate of the Naples University.

In the past he played major roles in INFN and University of Naples Federico II committees which are in charge of plans and policy decisions concerning computing and physics analysis in present and future experiments.

A selected list of past positions:
GARR (National Research Network for Research) manager of the Naples site (1992-1994);
Member of the INFN Executive Board for GRID computing (2000-2003);
Vice-director of the Department of Physics (2000-2003).
Director of the section of Naples of INFN (2004-2011).
Member of the INFN National Committee for Technology (2009-2011).
Member of the ECFA Plenary European Committee for Future Accelerators (2009-2014).