consultant for an FP7 European Project on heart modelling at CRS4 Sardinia, as an Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen and as a Reader in Applied Mathematics at Nottingham Trent University, since May 2017 he is helding an Associate Professor appointment in Applied Mathematics at the Faculty of Computer Science, University of Bozen-Bolzano. The specialty of his research is numerical linear algebra with applications and high-performance computing.

Previously, he had industry experience as a Research Engineer at Dividiti (UK) and as an intern at Nvidia (US).  He was also visiting researcher at Scalable Computing Lab at ETH and a Post-Doc at National Research Council of Italy (CNR).  He received his PhD in Computer Science from Sapienza, University of Rome in 2017 with the focus on the designing graph analytics on modern massively parallel systems. Dr. Vella, is also an active member of artifact evaluation initiatives for premier venues such as PPoPP, Computing Frontiers and IA3@IEEE Supercomputing conference.

Paola Lecca has experience in applying these conceptual and algorithmic tools to bioinformatics and computational biology. She is also carrying on an intense activity at the Smart Data Factory laboratory of the Faculty of Computer Science of University of Bolzano-Bozen aimed at promoting technology from the academic world to the industrial world.
Paola Lecca received a M.S. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Trento (Italy) in 1997 and a PhD in Computer Science in 2006 from the International Doctorate School in Information and Communication Technologies at the University of Trento (Italy). From 1998 to 2000 She was Research Assistant at the FBK-Center for Information Technologies of Trento by the research unit of Predictive Models for Biomedicine & Environment. From 2001 to 2002 I hold a scholarship at the Department of Physics of University of Trento in the area of data manipulation and predictive modelling in research programs of the INFN. In 2006 she joined as Researcher to COSBI (The Microsoft-Research University of Trento Centre for Computational and Systems Biology, Italy). In 2011 She became Principal Investigator at COSBI for leading the group of Data Manipulation and Knowledge Inference. From 2012 to 2015 I worked as Research Fellow at the Laboratory of Computational Oncology of CIBIO (Centre for Integrative Biology of University of Trento, Italy).
From 2015 to 2019 she was Research Fellow in the group OptHySys of the Department of Mathematics of University of Trento, where she focused on the development of hybrid stochastic algorithms for the simulation of dynamical networks.
Paola Lecca is also senior professional member of the Association for Computing Machinery, and author of about hundred publications including books and journal and conference papers on international journals in computational biology, bioinformatics, and biophysics. She is also carrying on an intense editorial activity as editor and reviewer for high impact factor journals in these subjects.