Riccardo Poli (born 1961) is a Professor in the Department of Computing and Electronic Systems of the University of Essex.
Poli started his academic career with a Laurea in electronic engineering from the University of Florence in 1989.
He later became an expert in the field of evolutionary computation, working as a Lecturer and then a Reader at the University of Birmingham from 1994 until 2001, when he moved to Essex as a professor.
He is a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College, an EU expert evaluator and a grant-proposal referee for Irish, Swiss and Italian funding bodies.
He is a Fellow of the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation[2] and a recipient of the EvoStar award for outstanding contributions to this field (2007).