He is also Director of the Institute of Complex Systems of the National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche).
After that he moved to Groningen in the Department of Physics as Professor of Condensed Matter Theory.
He is now a full professor of Condensed Matter Physics, University of Roma "La Sapienza".
The Institute includes more than 200 scientists (in various locations in Rome and Florence) from different groups of CNR, INFM, INOA and Universities.
He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1990 "for contributions to the theory of fractals, including the dielectric-breakdown model and his extensions of the theory of diffusion-limited aggregation and applications of fractal methods to astronomy" [1] In 2007 he was the chairman of the 23rd edition of the STATPHYS conference held in Genova.