Powered by: University of Bern
I was born on 12 April 1950 in Florence, Italy. I got my secondary school diploma in 1967 and then I began to attend courses of Biological Sciences at the University of Florence. There I had as a teacher in Zoology Prof. Leo Pardi, who was the very first scientist that began the study of ethology in Italy. Pardi, afterwards, became my tutor for a research on the social behaviour of Polistes wasps. I graduated on December 1973 with a thesis regarding size differences between castes in Polistes gallicus (now P. dominula ) with the first class honours. At that time there were no PhD courses in Italian Universities but I got the PhD degree in Biology some years later (1988) in a contest at the national level. After 15 months spent in the obligatory army service as a commissioned officer I won a 5 years fellowship at the Institute of Zoology of the University of Florence under the scientific leadership of Leo Pardi in 1975. I was especially interested in studying the mechanisms of dominance in groups of spring foundresses of Polistes wasps. The study was preceded by a complete re-arrangement of laboratory rearing system of Polistes in order to facilitate behavioural observations and experiments and the development of a simple type of glass cage that is used even today in laboratory research on these wasps.
The very first years of research At the end of fellowship in 1980 I got a position of researcher in the same Institute of Zoology. He performed various researches on Polistes social behaviour and function and anatomy of exocrine glands of these wasps. At the same time, in 1979, I and Pardi began a study on the sociobiology of Stenogastrine wasps in a very first mission to Java (Indonesia). The mission initiated a complex of investigations on these wasps that are considered fundamental for the comprehension of the evolution of social behaviour in wasps. The year after I married Cristina and in 1981 both spent a period of three and half months in Indonesia studying two species of stenogastrine wasps. The preliminary results of this field research were the object of a poster presented at the 11th Meeting of the International Union for the Study of Social Insects (IUSSI) held in Boulder where I met three of the scientists that most influenced my future scientific work: Mary Jane West Eberhard, Joan Strassmann and Mike Hansell. I became Associated Professor of Zoology in 1994 and full professor of Zoology in 1996. In 2001 I received the Award for Botany and Zoology of the Ministero dei Beni Culturali conferred by The Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei In 2000 I was accepted at the National Academy of Entomology and in 2004 I became e corresponding member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. The development of my research interests, as usual, was moulded by different factors such as unexpected breakthroughs, personal encounters and different opportunities of funding, but it had always social insects (wasps, ants and honeybees) as principal study objects.
Bibliometric Indicators Scopus (since 1996): 245 articles, 4957 citations, HI=42. Google Scholar: 8988 citations (2715 from 2016) HI=52 (HI=25 from 2016) My main contributions deal with a series of topics: 1) social behaviour of Polistine and Stenogastrine wasps; 2) Social parasitism in Polistes wasps and other social insects; 3) chemical communication in social insects; 4) description of exocrine glandular apparatuses of social wasps; 5) description of new species of Stenogastrine wasps; 6) mating behaviour in Polistine and Stenogastrine wasps; 7) behaviour and biology of Strepsiptera parasitizing social wasps; 8) wasp venom and allergic reactions; 9) antimicrobial secretions of social insects; 10) visual communication in social wasps; 11) social immunity and immune priming in social insects; 12) Symbiosis between social Insects and fungi. 13) social biology of Crematogaster ants; 14) studies on other social wasps rather than Polistes and Stenogastrinae. More recently I focused my interests on general Entomotherapy and I found a small enterprise as a spin off of the University of Firenze named Insect Pharma Entomotherapy srl.