Politecnico di Milano

Federica Villa (Female, Ph.D. in Electronics) is associate professor at Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria (DEIB) of Politecnico di Milano, with mature background in the design and development of smart sensors and their front-end circuits. She was born in 1986 in Milano (Italy). She graduated summa cum laude in Electronics Engineering in 2010 and she received the Ph.D. degree cum laude in Information Technology Engineering in 2014 at POLIMI. Her main activity aims to design silicon SPADs in standard CMOS and BCD technologies and to develop arrays of SPADs and Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs). In 2010 she interned in the Biochemistry Dept. of UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), and collaborated to develop a high throughput Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy set-up based on SPAD arrays. She designed various SPAD arrays, and she employed them in different applications such as LiDAR, spectrocopy and quantum imaging. 

Franco Zappa (Male, Ph.D. in Electronics) was born in 1965 in Milano. He received the M.S. in Electronic Engineering cum laude in 1989 and the Ph.D. degree in “Electronic and Communication Engineering” 1992, both at Politecnico di Milano (POLIMI), Italy. Since 2011 he is full professor of Electronics at Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria (DEIB) of POLIMI. His main research activities focus on the design and the development of microelectronics and electron devices for single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detectors and imagers for high-sensitivity luminescence measurements, 2D imaging and “time-of-flight” 3D depth ranging, in visible and near-infrared wavelength ranges. In 2004 he co-founded “MPD” (www.micro-photon-devices.com) deploying photon-counting and photon-timing modules an in 2020 “pioNIRS” (www.pionirs.com) deploying hi-tech fNIRS instrumentation, for non-invasive investigation of biological tissues and food. Ho coordinated various EC-funded (MiSPiA, UniQORN, Teinvein, etc.) and national projects.