Roberto Grossi got his Laurea degree cum laude in Computer Science (Scienze dell'Informazione) in the academic year 1987-1988 from Università di Pisa. He then obtained his Ph.D. degree in Computer Scienze (Dottorato di Ricerca in Informatica) from Università di Pisa in the academic year 1992-1993. He has been research and teaching assistant (Ricercatore K05B) at the Dipartimento di Sistemi e Informatica, Università di Firenze, from March 1993 to October 1998 and then Associate Professor (Professore Associato K05B, now INF/01) at the Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, from November 1998 to October 2010. He is currently Full Professor (Professore Straordinario INF/01) at the Dipartimento di Informatica, Universit\`a di Pisa, from November 2010.

His scientific activity was directed to the area of the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures, while visiting highly ranked international research institutions: Visiting scholar at Columbia University, Department of Computer Science, 1990-1991. Visiting researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories, USA, 1993 and 1995. Visiting scientist at Berkeley, International Institute of Computer Science, USA, 1995. Visiting researcher at Aarhus University, Institute for Basic Research in Computer Science, Denmark, 1996. Visiting professor at the Universite de Marne-la-Vallee, Laboratoire de Informatique, France, 2001. Visiting researcher at Tohoku University, Graduate School for Information Sciences, Japan, 2002, and Haifa University, Department of Computer Science, 2005 and 2010.

His research interests are both in theoretical problems for core research and in applications and experimental work. Specifically, his interests are focused on algorithms for combinatorial pattern matching and mining on strings, sequences, trees and matrices; design of algorithms and data structures for external and hierarchical memory; implicit, succinct and compressed data structures for (compressed) data sets; space- and time-efficient compressed indexing and fast searching in compressed text; text indexing and editing; multi-dimensional data structures; algorithm engineering for quick-access tables and dictionaries; routing algorithms for networks and robot; graph algorithms and pattern discovery in graphs and sequences.

His research results have been published in almost a hundred papers (many of them are available at DBLP). He his one of the few Italian authors cited in the second edition of the third volume of The Art of Computer Programming: Sorting and Searching by Donald Knuth for his contribution to the String B-Tree (along with P. Ferragina). His paper on Compressed Suffix Array (along with J.S. Vitter) has more than 450 citations in Google Scholar, that on High-Order Compressed Text Indexes (along with A. Gupta and J.S. Vitter) has more than 300 citations, and that on String B-tree has more than 260 citations. His h-index is 33 (computed with the Firefox plug-in Scholar H-Index Calculator).

He has been principal investigator of the bilateral research project Italo-Francese VINCI, Università Italo-Francese, 2002, and of the bilateral research project between Università di Pisa and King's College, Londra, for the Royal Society, UK (ref. Costas Iliopoulos, King's College). He has been key researcher leading his unit for the following research projects: MIUR-PRIN "AlgoDEEP Algorithmic challenges for Data-intensivE processing on Emerging computing Platforms" (2008-2010); MIUR-PRIN "MAINSTREAM: Algorithms for Massive Information Structures and Data Streams" (2007-2008); MIUR-PRIN "ALGONEXT: Algorithms for the Next Generation Internet and the Web" (2005-2006); MIUR-PRIN "ALINWEB: Algorithmics for Internet and for the Web" (2003-2004); EPST 2002 `"Algorithms for Modelling, Search and Inference Problems in Molecular Biology", Francia, 2002 (ref. Marie-France Sagot, INRIA). MURST-PRIN "Algorithms for Large Data Sets: Science and Engineering" (1999-2001); European Network of Excellence (NoE) in Text Mining and its Applications in Statistics, founded by EU (ref. CTI - Patras, Grecia), 2000.

He has been Managing Editor since 2003 in the Editorial Board for the international journal Theory of Computing Systems, Springer-Verlag, founded in 1967 as Mathematical System Theory, and since 2010 in the Editorial Board for the international journal RAIRO - Theoretical Informatics and Applications - Informatique Théorique et Applications, EDP Sciences. He has been Co-Editor of the special issues of Journal of Discrete Algorithms (along with F. Sebastiani and F. Silvestri) for the selected paper of SPIRE 2011, of Theory of Computing Systems (along with F. Luccio and P. Ferragina) for the selected paper of FUN 2004,and of Informatica (along with B. Vilfan) for the selected paper of IS-TCS 2003. He has been reviewer for many journals and conference: ACM Transactions on Algorithms, Algorithmica, Information Processing Letters, Journal of ACM, Journal of Algorithms, Journal of Discrete Algorithms, Journal of Parallel Algorithms and Applications, Parallel Processing Letters, SIAM Journal on Computing, Theoretical Computer Science, Colloquium on Trees in Algebra and Programming (CAAP), Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM), Convegno Italiano su Algoritmi e Complessità (CIAC), Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS), ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), Annual ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA), Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics (FPSAC), International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP), Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS), Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures (WADS), Foundation of Computer Science (FOCS).

He has been Conference Co-Chair of International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE 2011) and International conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2004). He has been Program Committee Member of the following conferences: Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 1999), Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2001), Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures (WADS 2001), Conference on Algorithms and Complexity (CIAC 2003), Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2003), Symposium on Theoretical Computer Science (STACS 2003), European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2004), Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2004), Information Society - Theoretical Computer Science (IS-TCS 2004), String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE 2004), Italian Conference on Theoretical Computer Science (ICTCS 2005), Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2005), String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE 2005), Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX 2006), Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2006), Scandinavian Symposium and Workshops on Algorithm Theory (SWAT 2010), International Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms (IWOCA 2010), Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2010), Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2010), Algorithms and Data Structures Symposium (WADS 2011), ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2012).

He is a member of the International Scientific Committee of the International Olympiad in Informatics. He has been the Treasurer of the Italian Chapter of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). He has been the reviewer of international research projects for several Science Foundations, and international PhD Theses committees. He is part of the Council for the International Ph.D. School Galileo Galilei. He gave lectures for International Ph.D. Schools, such as Lipari School on Algorithmics for Data Mining and Pattern Discovery, July 2003 (other lecturers: C. Papadimitriou, G. Myers, A. Broder, P. Raghavan, A. Apostolico, D. Shasha, E. Simon, A. Karlin, M. Crochemore, E. Ukkonen, M. F. Sagot).