- Year of nomination: 2014
- Facility: Department of Electronic, Information and Bioengineering
- E-mail: maurizio.decina@polimi.it
“Graduated in 1966 with a degree in Electronic Engineering from Sapienza Università di Roma, he became a full professor at this university in 1980 and moved to the same position at Politecnico di Milano in 1986. Maurizio Dècina has equally divided his 55-year career between academia and industry. In fact, he has worked in the field of telecommunications in various fields of application: from research to teaching, from international standards to the prototype and industrial development of numerical switches, from operation to the regulation of telecommunications networks
He was scientific advisor to Bell Laboratories in Chicago (USA), director of Research and Development at Italtel di Milano, and scientific director and founder, together with professor Francesco Carassa, of the CEFRIEL consortium at the Politecnico di Milano. Professor Dècina was commissioner of the AGCOM Communications Guarantee Authority, president of the Ugo Bordoni Foundation in Rome and president of Infratel Italia, as well as a member of the Board of Directors of Telecom Italia, Italtel and other ICT companies.
His research activities have focused on digital transmission over coaxial cables and fibre optics, the development of high-capacity circuit and packet switching equipment, and the development of network interoperability and security. Professor Dècina was the editor of two important international journals in the field: Journal on Selected Areas in Communications and European Transactions on Telecommunications.
Professor Dècina was one of the 'fathers' of fast packet switching networks, an innovation that marked a turning point in communications, paving the way for today's Internet, and which earned him prestigious awards. In 1994-95, he was president of the Communications Society of the IEEE, which is the international association of telecommunications engineers. In 1986, he was named a Life Fellow of the IEEE for his technical and scientific contributions to digital communications and packet switching for voice and data, and has received three IEEE awards: International Communications (1997), Third Millennium Medal (2000), and ComSoc/KICS Global Service (2008)”.
[career highlights kindly provided by professor Decina in 2023]