Piero Castoldi was born in Trento (Italy) in 1966. He got his laurea degree (cum laude) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Bologna in 1991 and his Ph.D. degree in Information Technologies from the University of Parma in 1996. In 1996/97 he was a Visiting Post-doc Researcher at the Department of Electrical Engineering of Princeton University (USA). He was also hosted there in the summers 1999 and 2000. From December 1997 until February 2001 he was assistant professor at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Parma, where he got the tenure. Since March 2001 he has been Associate Professor in Telecommunications at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa. In January and February 2002 he has been Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, USA. Since 1995 he has collaborated to several projects of the Italian National Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT) and since March 2003 he is Deputy Director, and since January 2005 Director of the CNIT National Photonic Networks Laboratory in Pisa, Italy. Since academic years 2005/06 he has been coordinator of the International Master on Communication Networks Engineering (IMCNE) and more recently of the Erasmus Mundus Master on Photonic Networks Engineering (MAPNET) and the Master (Laurea Magistrale) in Computer Science and Networking (MCSN).

He is the research leader of the "Networks and Services" area at the Integrated Research Center for Photonic Networks and Technologies (IRCPhoNeT), a research center jointly supported by Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, CNIT and Ericsson. He is currently local responsible and he is Responsible of the Virtual Center of Excellence on Application and Services in the BONE FP7 Network of Excellence and FIRB Project "Software and Communication Platforms for High Performance Collaborative Grid". He held formerly research responsibilities in the following projects: NoE e-photon/ONE, NoE e-photon/ONE+, italo-canadian Serenade project funded by Ministry of Foreign Affairs, FIRB project "GRID.IT", national PRIN "TOWN" project and many others. He also manages an industrial collaboration on network control reliability of high-speed train with the National Railway Company (Rete Ferroviaria Italiana) and is involved in research on next generation networks within a long term research agreement with Ericsson.

The scientific activity has covered  the areas of digital transmission, telecommunication networks and systems both wired and wireless. Specifically he has carried out research activities in the following areas: mobile radio systems based on TDMA and CDMA,  telecommunication networks architectures for interactive multimedia services, provisioning, resilience, management and control for next generation optical networks and more recently service oriented network architectures. He is author of more than 170 publications in international journals con conference proceedings and he has authored an international book on multiuser detection for CDMA mobile terminals edited by Artech House. He is currently serving as a TPC Member of several IEEE conferences (Globecom, Broadnets, Gridnets, ICTON) and as a reviewer for IEEE JLT, JSAC and Computer Networks. He is an IEEE Member.