Lorenzo Farina was born in Rome, Italy, on October 3, 1963. He received the “Laurea” degree in Electrical Engineering (summa cum laude) and the Ph.D. degree in Systems Engineering from the University of Rome, “La Sapienza”, Rome, Italy. He was a Scientific Consultant at the Interdepartmental Research Centre for Environmental Systems and Information Analysis, at the Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, in 1993. He was the Project Coordinator at Tecnobiomedica S.p.A., in the field of remote monitoring of patients with heart diseases, in 1995, and held a visiting position at the Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering, the Australian National University in 1997. Since 1996 he has been with the Department of Computer and Systems Science, the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, where he is currently Associate Professor of Modelling and Simulation and Automatic Control. He is co-author of the book “Positive Linear Systems: Theory and Applications” with S. Rinaldi, Series on Pure and Applied Mathematics, Wiley-Interscience, New York, 2000. He is co-recipient of the Guillemin-Cauer Best Paper Award od the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems in 2001. He has been the co-chairman of the “International Symposium on Positive Systems: Theory and Applications”, POSTA 2003, held in Rome, 29-31 August 2003.
His research interests are in the general area of positive linear systems. Positive systems are characterized by the specific property that the state and output variables remain nonnegative whatever the positive input sequence might be. These systems are quite common mainly in the biological and economic sciences where input, output and state variables represent positive quantities. Examples are: populations, consumption of goods, densities of chemical species and so on. Apart from theoretical investigations (structural properties, realization and identification), he has also applied the theory of positive systems to filter implementation using Charge Routing Networks (an integrated MOS technology) and optical fibers. Recently, his interests are also in the area of matematical modeling in biomolecular genetics, gene regulatory networks and metabolic pathways.
