Paolo Serena was born in Piacenza, Italy, in 1973. He received a degree in electronic engineering from the Università degli Studi di Parma, Parma, Italy, in 1999. From 2000 to 2003 he followed the P.h.D. at the University of Parma, Department of information engineering. Paolo Serena has been a visiting scientist at Alcatel-Lucent, Bell Labs, laboratories in 2002 for experimental investigations. During 2003-2004 he was a post-doc at the University of Parma. From 2005 to 2018 he was an assistant professor at the Department of Engineering and Architecture, University of Parma. Currently, he is an Associate professor in the same department where he teaches an advanced course in optical communication for the Master's degree in Communication Engineering at Parma, and a course on communication systems for the bachelor's degree in computer science, electronics, and communications.
Paolo Serena has served as the University of Parma's course director for Communication Engineering from 2025.
He is also responsible for the quality of the Master of Science in communication engineering. Since 2016 he is a member of the admission committee of foreign students to the Master of Science in Communication Engineering. Since 2014 P. Serena participates in the organization of the researcher’s night (“Notte dei ricercatori”), a Europe-wide public and open event aiming to raise awareness about research.
Paolo Serena has been collaborating as a principal investigator on research projects with Nokia, Bell Labs, (Paris, France), and Alcatel Submarine Networks, (Paris, France) for over twenty years. He is also a member of the national project PRIN 2017 (FIRST). Other partners are the University of L’Aquila (A. Mecozzi coordinator), Turin Polytechnic, Milan Polytechnic, University of Padua, S. Anna School. The project is focused on the analysis of the effectiveness and viability of space division multiplexing fiber optic links.
P. Serena is a member of the group OptikLab (http://optiklab.tlc.unipr.it/ ), led by Prof. A. Bononi, at the University of Parma, and a member of the scientific committee of the CNIT laboratory FIBERS at L’Aquila (Italy).
Paolo Serena is an IEEE senior member.
He was a member of the technical committee of the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) in 2018-2022 and since 2013 of the Italian Conference on op optics and Photonics ICOP. He has been also a member of the technical program committee of the Tyrrhenian International Workshop on Digital Communications, Pisa, Italy, 2015, and of the technical program committee of the international Asia Communications and Photonics Conference (ACP), Shanghai, China, 2015.
P. Serena was an organizer of the workshop “New modeling challenges in optical communications” at the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) 2019. Co-organizers: Mitsuru Takenaka, University of Tokio (Japan), and Leslie Rusch, University of Laval (Canada).
From 2019-2024 P. Serena was associate editor of Optics Express.
Paolo Serena has been invited for a "tutorial" talk at the international conference Optical fiber technology, OFC 2023. He also had several invited talks at international conferences. He was coauthor of four conference papers that received the top-scored award at the ECOC conference. He was also a coauthor of a paper for Optics Express that received the "Editor's Pick" in 2023.
His main research interests include fiber-optic communications, including nonlinear Kerr effects and their modeling, transmission performance evaluation, numerical methods for fiber-optic propagation, coherent detection, digital signal processing for communication purposes, polarization effects in fiber optics, space-division multiplexing, and information theory.
Paolo Serena is the creator and first maintainer of the open-source software called Optilux (https://optilux.sourceforge.io/) to simulate optical communication systems.
