Nicola Blefari-Melazzi is a full Professor of Telecommunications at the University of Roma Tor Vergata, where he served as Chair of the PhD program in Telecommunications Engineering, Chair of the undergraduate and graduate programs in Telecommunications Engineering and Chair of the Department of Electronic Engineering. He is currently the Director of CNIT (National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications, http://www.cnit.it/), a non-profit Consortium among 37 Italian Universities. More than 1,300 people, belonging to the participating universities, collaborate with CNIT, while the number of own-employees is more than 100.

His research projects have been funded by Italian Ministries, by the Italian National Research Council, by major companies (e.g., Ericsson, Telecom Italia), by the ESA and by the EU. He has participated in 32 EU projects, playing the role of project coordinator and PI for seven of them. He has been a member of the board of the 5G Infrastructure Association, the private side of the 5G Public Private Partnership  (http://5g-ppp.eu/), a joint initiative between the European ICT sector and the European Commission, which funds with a 1.4 Billion Euro budget the R&D on 5G. He is still a member of the 5G Infrastructure Association, that recently founded the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking together with the European Commission, which will fund with 900 MEUR the research and development for 6G and related technologies. He evaluated many research proposals and projects in EU programs and served as TPC member, TPC Chair, General Chair and Steering Committee Chair for IEEE Conferences and guest editor for IEEE Journals. He is an area editor for Elsevier’s Computer Networks. He is author/co-author of about 250 papers. His research interests lie in the performance evaluation, design and control of telecommunications networks.