He is renowned for the discovery of theories introducing supersymmetry as a symmetry of elementary particles (super-Yang–Mills theories, together with Bruno Zumino[1]) and of supergravity, the first significant extension of Einstein's general relativity, based on the principle of "local supersymmetry" (together with Daniel Z. Freedman, and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen[2]).
Since then he has worked as a CNEN and INFN researcher at the Frascati National Laboratories; as a CNRS Visiting Scientist at the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and at the Theory Division at CERN, Geneva.
During the years 2010-2014 he has been a guest professor at CERN as Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Advanced Grant SUPERFIELDS.
In a series of papers written in collaboration with Raoul Gatto, Aurelio Grillo and Giorgio Parisi, he studied constraints imposed by conformal symmetry on the operator dimensions, the form of the correlation functions, the operator product expansion, and the conformal partial wave expansion for the four-point correlation functions of the theory.
[5][6] In 2019 the three were awarded a special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics of $3 million[7] for the discovery.