Roberto Cingolani

Roberto Cingolani is an Italian physicist, academic and executive. He served as Chief Executive Officer and General Manager of Leonardo, the Italian aerospace, defence and security group, from 2023 to 2026, a period in which the company achieved record order backlogs and undertook a major transformation towards digital, cyber and AI-driven capabilities.

Cingolani was Italy's Minister for Ecological Transition in the government of Mario Draghi (2021–2022), overseeing the country's energy and climate policy during the implementation of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. He had previously served as Leonardo's first Chief Technology and Innovation Officer (2019–2021), leading its cybersecurity and artificial intelligence programmes.

Before entering industry and government, he was the founding Scientific Director of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Genoa (2005–2019), establishing it as one of Europe's leading research institutions in robotics, nanotechnology and the life sciences. He is the author of numerous scientific publications and patents.

Cingolani holds a PhD in Physics from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. He was a staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart (1988–1990), a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo and Virginia Commonwealth University, and Director of the National Nanotechnology Laboratory of the INFM while Professor of Physics at the University of Salento (1994–2009).