Dr Gianluca Valentino obtained a First Class Honours undergraduate degree in communications and computer engineering from the University of Malta in 2010. He was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Malta in 2013 for the development of a fast and automatic procedure for the alignment of collimation system of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which has saved hundreds of hours and millions of euros in operational costs for CERN over the years. The LHC collimators need to be positioned with an accuracy less than the width of a human hair with respect to the highly energetic and potentially destructive beam, in order for the collider to operate securely.

From 2013 to 2016, Dr Valentino was a Marie Curie Action CERN-COFUND senior postdoctoral fellow within the Beams department at CERN, responsible for the collimation control software and the development and commissioning of 18 new collimators with embedded Beam Position Monitors, which were installed during Long Shutdown 1.

In 2015, together with other academics from the Faculty of ICT, Dr Valentino set up a collaboration with the ALICE experiment at CERN to work on the online-offline computing upgrade foreseen for 2019-2021, after which the experiment expects to have a challenging data throughput of 1TB/s. He has helped to develop a novel automatic luminosity levelling procedure which has been adopted by the ALICE experiment, and is working on pattern recognition algorithms which help the detectors to improve event reconstruction following the increase in data foreseen for Run 3. Dr Valentino is the UoM team leader within the ALICE collaboration.

Dr Valentino is a co-founder and current coordinator of the Particle Detector and Accelerator Programme established by the university Senate, which gathers academics and students conducting research in the fields of physics, computing and engineering in relation to particle detectors and accelerators. He remains a Visiting Scientist at CERN, where he continues to provide expertise for the LHC Collimation Project in addition to supervising several Masters and PhD students.

Affiliations:

- Visiting Scientist at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

Awards:

- Best ICT Project, ICT Final Year Engineering Projects Exhibition, 2010. Awarded by the Chamber of Engineers, Malta

- Extraordinary service during LHC beam studies as member of the LHC collimation team, 2013. Awarded by the CERN Director-
General.

Roles held:

- Coordinator, University of Malta Particle Accelerator and Detector Programme

- Secretary, IEEE Malta Section

- Treasurer, Malta Chamber of Scientists

- Associate Editor, Xjenza Online

Peer-review:

I have reviewed for: Acta Astronautica, Instruments, the International Particle Accelerator Conference, IT Professional, Nuclear
Sciences and Techniques, and Results in Physics.