Guido Emilio Tonelli

Born in Casola in Lunigiana (MS) on 8 November 1950, he first lived in La Spezia, where he obtained his classical secondary-school diploma at the “L. Costa” Liceo Scientifico, and then in Pisa, where he graduated in Physics in 1975 and met his life companion who would become his wife, Luciana Piddiu, with whom he has two children, Diego (34) and Giulia (26).

Permanent position: Full Professor of General Physics at the University of Pisa and collaborator of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN). Since October 2006 he has been on leave from the University for research reasons and works at CERN in Geneva (Switzerland) as Scientific Associate.

Research activity

He has worked in high-energy physics since 1978, taking part in experiments at CERN (Switzerland) and at Fermilab (Chicago, USA). His research includes the first precision measurements of the lifetime of “charmed” mesons, the determination of the number of light neutrino families, precision measurements on the intermediate vector bosons W and Z, and experimental tests of the Standard Model of fundamental interactions.

He is among the pioneers of semiconductor detector development in high-energy physics and is the “father” of the silicon tracker at the heart of CMS. He has been involved in the experiment since its first conceptual design and for many years has coordinated the activity of the Italian group of the experiment, with about 250 physicists and engineers distributed across 14 sections of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics. In 2006 he was appointed International Deputy Spokesperson of the experiment and moved to CERN to closely follow the installation and commissioning of the apparatus.

He is the author of 315 scientific publications in international journals, with an average citation index greater than 50.