download the full CV (PDF, updated September 27, 2026)

Present position

• 2023– Chief Science Officer, Materys SRL, Trieste.
• 2011– Director, Quantum ESPRESSO Foundation.
• 2025– Retired visiting professor at Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA), Trieste.

Education

• 1978 Laurea in Fisica, University of Pisa (Italy), with honors.

Previous positions

• 1999–2025 Full professor of theoretical condensed matter physics at SISSA.
• 1994–98 Director, Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire (CECAM), then hosted at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France.
• 1988–99 Associate professor at SISSA.
• 1984–88 Assistant professor (Ricercatore) at the Department of Theoretical Physics, University of Trieste, Italy.
• 1979–84 Postdoc (Assistant) at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.

Institutional responsibilities

• 2022– Co-leader of the Materials and molecular sciences “spoke” (section) of the Italian National Centre for HPC, Big Data, and Quantum Computing.
• 2007–10 Head of the Condensed Matter Theory Sector (department) at SISSA and member of the SISSA Academic Senate.
• 2001–08 Founding director of the INFM DEMOCRITOS National Simulation Center.
• 1998–03 Head of the Trieste INFM research unit and member of the INFM board of directors.

INFM: Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica della Materia, now part of the Italian CNR.

Scientific profile

SB’s research lies at the frontier between condensed-matter theory and simulation, with a penchant for software engineering and high-performance computing: he develops methods to compute properties and simulate processes previously deemed inaccessible to scientific computation, implements them in high-performance codes, and applies them to scientifically and technologically relevant problems. He is largely credited for the introduction of density-functional perturbation theory (DFPT), now the state of the art for the lattice dynamics of solids, and has pioneered O(N) methods in electronic-structure theory and new quantum Monte Carlo algorithms. More recently, he has extended DFPT to electronic excited states and, over the past 10 years, has contributed to the theory and simulation of heat and charge transport in liquid and disordered systems.

SB has authored ≈ 270 scientific publications in peer reviewed journals and conference proceedings. His full list of publications is available on the publications page and at his ORCID profile.

Honors

SB is a fellow of the American Physical Society (since 2007) and a member of the Accademia Peloritana dei Pericolanti in Messina (Italy, since 2005). He is the recipient of the 2026 Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics, awarded by the American Physical Society.

Entrepreneurship

SB is founder, shareholder, and Chief Science Officer of Materys, a startup that provides advanced quantum simulation solutions of materials as a service.