Francesco Taccogna

Francesco Taccogna was born in Bitritto, Bari, Italy, in 1974. He received the M.S. degrees in physics and the Ph.D. degree in innovative material chemistry from the University of Bari, Bari, in 2000 and 2003, respectively. From 2003 to 2005, he was a Post-Doctoral Researcher with the University of Bari. From 2005 to 2007, he was the EURATOM Marie-Curie Intra European Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute fur Plasmaphysik, Greifswald, Germany. In 2007, he joined the University of Bari as a Post-Doctoral Researcher. Since 2008, he has been a Researcher at the PLasMI Lab, Institute for Nanotechnology, National Research Council, Bari. His current research interests include dynamics and kinetics of nonequilibrium rarefied gases and plasmas, ion sources (gas discharges, electric thrusters, negative ion sources, and atmospheric pressure microdischarges) and particle-based numerical models of gases and plasmas (particle in cell and direct simulation Monte Carlo). Dr. Taccogna is a Senior Editor of the IEEE-TPS. He received the Best Communication Awards from the Italian Physics Society in 2009.