Giuseppe Carbone received the MSc degree in Mechanical Engineering (with honors) in 1998 and the PhD in Advanced Production Systems in 2002 from Politecnico di Bari (Italy). He is currently Full Professor. of Applied Mechanics and Tribology. From 2018 to 2024, he served as Head of the Department of Mechanics, Mathematics and Management at Politecnico di Bari. Since 2021, he is President of the Italian Tribology Association.
In 2010, he founded the Smart Tribology Lab at Politecnico di Bari, internationally recognized for research on tribology, contact mechanics, viscoelastic materials, adhesion, biomimetic micro-structured surfaces, and intelligent functional materials. He is currently leading the establishment of the China–Italy International Joint Laboratory on Smart Tribology, a strategic research initiative jointly developed by Nanjing University of Science and Technology and Politecnico di Bari, aimed at advancing fundamental and applied research on friction, adhesion, and advanced functional surfaces.
He has held visiting and academic positions at Imperial College London, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Eindhoven University of Technology, and the University of North Texas, and is Research Associate at the Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnologies of the Italian National Research Council. His research has been funded by national, European, and industrial programs for several million euros. He has authored over 300 publications, including about 170 journal papers indexed in Scopus, with more than 7.000 citations and an H-index of 45. He serves as Associate Editor of Tribology International and Chaos, Solitons & Fractals.
M. Clelia Righi is Full Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of Bologna University. Her research activity focuses on the development and application of computational methods to understand and predict the behaviour of materials from first principles, particularly of surface and interface phenomena.
She adopted pioneering computational approaches in tribology and applied them for understanding chemical reactions activated by mechanical stresses and designing materials to reduce friction. She received an ERC consolidator grant for the project “Advancing solid interfaces and lubricants by first principles material design” (SLIDE) in 2019 and an ERC Proof of Concept grant for the project “Tribosynthesis of carbon coatings for friction and wear reduction” in 2025.
M. Clelia Righi is visiting professor at the Imperial College London, UK and collaborates with multinational companies in the energy and automotive sectors.
Auezhan Amanov is currently an Associate Professor at Tampere University in Finland. He is the head of the Tribology and Surface Modification research group. He is an active member of several professional societies, including STLE and KTS. With over 170 publications in international peer-reviewed journals and a Hirsch index of 37, his research primarily focuses on enhancing the wear resistance of various materials through surface treatment techniques