Nicola Ciulli, head of Research & Development activities at Nextworks, holds a degree in Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Pisa and SSSUP S. Anna (1997). His core expertise is on GMPLS/PCE control planes architectures for SDH, WDM and Transport Ethernet, and his current activities concern architectures and protocols of control and management planes in telecommunication networks, and several aspects of Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), applied to transport networks, data centres and cloud computing.

He participated in several (18) EU FP4, FP5, FP6 and FP7 projects in collaboration with a wide range of EU actors (academia, telcos and equipment vendors), in National and Regional research initiatives, and in industrial projects (for, e.g., Marconi Communications, Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson).

He also has more than 10 years of experience (FP6 and FP7) as an external expert in EC evaluations, project reviews and call observations.