Every now and then, for one reason or another, an academic will have to update one's own CV. This is a chore in general - once you get tenure, why should you care to keep a detailed record of your past activities? - but it also carries some benefits. In fact, by sifting through the data (hard disk folders containing talks, large databases of publications, mailbox) you can get a bird's eye view of where your time has gone, and draw inspiration for future rationalization of your agenda.
I spent the past couple of weeks doing precisely that, and since this is my personal blog, what could be a better place to store some of the results? I fully understand this might not be of interest to a large part of my readership... But these days I do not even know any more what is my readership. I have hit counts, that's true, but the way people use blogs has changed over the years, and very few readers care to comment or leave a trace of their passage - a positive note or a criticism, whatever that may be - in the comments thread. So anyway, below I will summarize the findings of my survey of past activities. At the bottom I add some discussion notes.
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Current charges:
2026- INFN PI of "PHINDER" EIC-Pathfinder project
2026- RECAT Guest Professor, LTU (SE)
2025- Coordinator of Working Group 2 of EUCAIF (https://eucaif.org)
2022- President of "Universal Scientific Education and Research Network", https://usern.org
2019- First Researcher at INFN
2009- Member of CMS "Statistics Committee"
Past charges:
2023-2025 WASP Guest Researcher, LTU (SE)
2020-2022 Co-chair, "Thesis Award Committee", CMS experiment
2020-2024 Scientific Coordinator of MODE Collaboration (mode-collaboration.github.io)
2017-2022 Outreach Coordinator of ITN "INSIGHTS"
2015-2019 Scientific Coordinator of ITN "AMVA4NewPhysics"
2012-2015 Chair of "CMS Statistics Committee"; deputy chair (2011)
2005-2019 Researcher at INFN
2003-2005 Research grant, INFN-Padova
2002-2010 Scientific Coordinator of CDF control room (9 shifts)
2001-2003 Post-doc grant, University of Padova
2000-2001 Post-doc, INFN Padova
1999-2000 Post-doctoral fellow, Harvard University (USA)
1998-2012 Coordination of several working groups in CDF, Tevatron, CMS
Current and past INFN charges
2026- PI INFN of PHINDER project
2024- INFN-PD local representative of DRD6Calo collaboration
2020- Referee INFN for MuOnE experiment
2017-2022 PI INFN-PD of "INSIGHTS" ITN
2019-2021 INFN-PD lcal representative for "Art&Science" project
2016- Referee INFN for BES-III experiment
2016-2020 Group 1 Coordinator, INFN-Padova
2015-2019 Pi INFN of AMVA4NewPhysics ITN
2012-2020 Evalutaor of prizes "Premio Conversi", "Fellini" grants, research grants for INFN
Grants won:
2026- EIC-Pathfinder-2025 "PHINDER", 3.3M euro, Horizon Europe (EC)
2026- COST action "AIFORIA", Horizon Europe (EC)
2026- RECAT grant (SE), 200k SEK
2023-2025 WASP grant (SE), 1M SEK
2017-2022 MSCA-ITN-2017 "INSIGHTS", 3.0M euro, Horizon2020 (EC)
2015-2019 MSCA-ITN-2015 "AMVA4NewPhysics", 2.4M euro, Horizon2020 (EC)
Editorial and review activities
2025-2026 Editor in Chief of journal "Results in Physics" (Elsevier)
2025 Editor of journal "Physics Letters A" (Elsevier)
2019- Editor of journal "Physics Open" (Elsevier)
2016- Opposer at 9 PhD defenses (I,F,BE,NO,RO,PT)
2015-2025 Editor of journal "Reviews in Physics" (Elsevier)
2008-2011 Member of "Spokespersons Publication Review Group" of CDF experiment
2005- Peer reviewer for 25 scientific journals
2004- Chair of 28 Analysis Review Committees for CDF and CMS collaborations
2000- Referee of funding proposals for 16 international agencies, incl. Horizon 2020 / Europe
Participation to scientific collaborations and societies, advisories, boards
2025- Member of TAMBO collaboration
2024- Fellow of EUCAIF collaboration
2023- Member of DRD6CALO, SWGO, Muon Collider collaborations
2021- Member of Advisory board of SilentBorder project, silentborder.eu (EC)
2020- Founder of MODE Collaboration and steering board member
2020- Member of Ellis society (ellis.eu)
2019- Member of advisory board of USERN network
2017- Member of directive council of PhD school, University of Padova
2001- Member of CMS collaboration
1995-2012 Member of CDF collaboration
Organization of conferences, workshops, scientific meetings
2020- Organizer of MODE workshops
2017 Member of organizing committee of "EPS-HEP" conference
2016- Member of organizing committee and convener of session for QCHS conference series
2013- Member of organizing committee of INFN school of statistics
Dissemination
- Presented research results at 59 conferences and workshops (22 invited)
- Held 43 seminars and 4 physics colloquia at universities and research centers
- Author of 2008 publications on peer-reviewed journals, with over 250k citations; h-index 220
Supervision activities
2005- Supervisor of 6 post-doctoral fellows, INFN-Padova
2002- Supervisor of 12 PhD students, University of Padova
2000-2007 Supervisor of 9 summer students (Fermilab) and 4 interns (Univ.Padova)
1998- Supervisor of 51 Laurea/Master students in Physics or Statistics, Univ. Padova
Teaching
2019- Invited lecturer in Machine Learning at 6 doctoral schools (PT,CH,IND,SE,I,TN)
2018-2025 Hired professor, Master in Statistics, Padova Universtiy
2013- Lecturer for PhD course, University of Padova
2012- Invited lecturer in Statistics at 10 doctoral schools (IND, EL,I, CH, CN, OS, F)
2007-2012 Professor for course "Gauge Physics", University of Padova
2004- Invited lecturer in Physics at 5 doctoral schools (I, EL, EC)
Outreach
- Author of over 1500 articles on personal blog (over 15M views)
- Author of blog of conference "Neutrino telescopes", 2011-2017
- Author of book "Anomaly! Collider Physics and the quest for new phenomena at Fermilab" (2016)
- Held 26 lectures in high schools (for CERN Masterclasses, "Art & Science", et al.)
- Held lectures or participated as speaker at 24 public lectures, TV shows, Radio shows, debates, etc.
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So, the above does not provide a measure of the true impact of my scientific research activities - which I think is better represented (especially for what concerns the past 10 years) by a very small subset of the 2008 publications I authored, and by some initiatives I have carried out especially in the field of AI for science. But it does show where I spent my time, so some considerations are in order.
First of all, I am impressed by the number of talks, seminars, etcetera. I knew I have been doing that a lot, but if you sum the 59 conference talks, the 47 seminars and colloquia, the 24 public lectures, the 26 high school lectures, the 21 lectures at PhD schools you get 177 events. Sounds reasonable in a 25+ years career, but reading the numbers, and acknowledging that each of these events required some preparation, I reckon that they required a significant part of my time to be performed, perhaps in the 10-15% range. In the future, I plan to pick a bit more selectively what to agree to, what to attend, and what invitations to respectfully decline.
Second, the reviewing and editorship activites are also more intense than I would like them to be, given that I am the happiest when I can devote my time to research proper. Here accounting is made harder by several factors - refereeing takes a long time for some of the bigger jobs like grant reviews, less for reviews of papers; and I don't even know how many papers I reviewed in total (must be over a 100). I can't attach a time fraction to this activity though.
One special note concerns internal reviewing for CMS. I knew I had been doing a lot of that, but I was surprised to realize that with the chairing of 27 analysis review committees (ARC) in that experiment, I am fourth in the list of most prolific ARC chairs. That is to say, in a 6000-member collaboration there are only three colleagues who chaired a larger number of analyses. Another way to see this is to take the total number of CMS publications (1434) and observe that I chaired about 2 percent of the relative internal review groups - that is a lot, and I think it is a measure I should be proud of.
Moving on, I am rather happy with the involvement I have had in conference organization. This is an incredibly time-consuming activity, and I have always tried to stay away from it. The numbers above show this rather clearly. I think I am going to keep that as is in the future.
Teaching: here I am also surprised by the number of courses and by the number of students I supervised. Not too many PhD students, but over 50 Master and Laurea students - and these take a significant amount of time! But I do like to work with students, and I think it is an important activity even for somebody who is mainly paid to do research. So I don't think I want to change anything here.
Finally, grants. What the list above does not show is the number of applications I have made, over the years. In truth, I believe I have been quite successful in my grant applications! To be honest, I do not know of any colleague of similar seniority who won four European projects (I would be hard-pressed to name ones who won two or three). And the EIC-Pathfinder I won last year was a 2% success rate endeavour, meaning you should on average expect to have to apply 50 times to win one, if you are an average grant writer. Of course I did not write 50 grant applications in my life, more like 15. Still, that is a very time-consuming occupation, and I think I can be satisfied with what I have got so far. In the future I will coast along and only take part in applications where I am not the driving force; e.g., resubmissions of projects that did not win in the past (like two ITN projects that went south last year).
So, that's it - overall, I think the exercise above was overall worth it, as I got some useful food for thought! I will be happy to read your reactions in the comments thread if you have any.
A Record Of Past Activities
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