President of SleepActa, Associate Professor of Physiology at the University of Pisa and leads a sleep research lab called Sonnolab. Until October 2018, he has also been Medical Director of the Center of Sleep Disorders at the Pisa University Hospital.  The key characteristic of his research activities is his ability to apply wearable technologies to the non-invasive and large-scale monitoring of sleep, thanks to his medical and basic research background. Ugo Faraguna coordinates and is the Principal Investigator of the “Fry the Brain” project (Ricerca Finalizzata, Italian Ministry of Health) and scientific coordinator of academic as well as SME units in several national and international consortia. During his PhD (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy), Prof. Faraguna developed a strong collaboration with Prof. Giulio Tononi (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA), with whom he investigated the homeostatic aspects of the sleep-wake cycle, in the animal model during the doctoral year and the following postdoctoral ones (overall he spent 7 years in the Department of Psychiatry in Madison, WI as PhD first, Postdoc later and finally Scientist). Now, he is investigating novel machine-learning based approaches for the analysis of sleep and waking via wearable sensors, a key topic in NAP.

Born in Pescara in 1971, Andrea Vecchi graduated in Computer Science in Pisa and worked as a researcher at the Scuola Normale di Pisa for the next five years, carrying out projects in the area of digitisation and enhancement of the national cultural heritage. In 1999, he founded Liberologico, a company geared towards the incubation of innovative product-oriented entrepreneurial ideas destined to become start-ups. This initiative gave rise to Cloudesire and Kiunsys, companies later acquired by the Engineering Group in which he held the role of CTO. Today he offers advisory and strategic consulting services to big enterprises and start-ups with high growth potential.