PhD in Engineering of Complex Systems
Università del Salento — Lecce, Italy
Research project: Quantum Computing and Quantum Machine Learning approaches for Climate Change applications, including quantum data assimilation.
PhD Student · Università del Salento
Emanuele Donno
Working on Quantum Machine Learning
Computer Engineer exploring how quantum computing and machine learning can help us understand — and forecast — a changing climate.
Quantum ML
Climate AI
4
Publications & preprints
18
Months of climate-AI research at CMCC
7
Selected projects, from HPC to full-stack
9
Certifications & awards
About me
Nice to meet you 👋
I'm a licensed Computer Engineer and a PhD student in Engineering of Complex Systems at the University of Salento, where I research Quantum Computing and Quantum Machine Learning approaches for climate science.
Before the PhD I spent about 18 months as a Post-Degree Researcher at the Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change (CMCC), building end-to-end ML/DL pipelines on multidimensional climate datasets and contributing to ML4Fires, the wildfire-forecasting module of the EU interTwin Digital Twin project, trained at scale on HPC.
My path started in Physics, moved on to Information and Computer Engineering and, along the way, picked up a full-stack toolbox: Python, Java/Spring Boot, Angular/Ionic, Docker and MPI. Born and raised in Lecce, I love meeting new people, and away from the keyboard you'll find me playing chess or lost in a good book.
- Based inLecce, Italy
- CurrentlyPhD, Engineering of Complex Systems
- LicensedOrder of Engineers of Lecce, since 2024
- LanguagesItalian (native) · English (B2, IELTS 6.0)
- Off-screenChess, reading, good company
Journey
Experience & education
From physics lectures to supercomputers and qubits.
Post-Degree Researcher
CMCC Foundation — Advanced Scientific Computing (ADIC) Division, Lecce
- Worked on ML4Fires, the wildfire-forecasting module of the EU interTwin project (GA 101058386), part of the Environmental Digital Twin Engine for global wildfire propagation and projection.
- Built end-to-end ML/DL pipelines (data preparation, feature engineering, training, evaluation) for CNN, U-Net and U-Net++ on the SeasFire Cube v3 datacube (NetCDF/Xarray) and CMIP6 SSP projections.
- Helped migrate the training stack from TensorFlow to PyTorch, running multi-node, multi-GPU distributed training and containerized inference on HPC.
- Adopted MLflow for experiment tracking and reproducibility.
M.Sc. in Computer Engineering 105/110
Università del Salento — Lecce, Italy
Thesis: Global downscaling of remotely sensed soil-moisture retrievals using Machine Learning. Courses in High Performance Computing, Computer Vision and Parallel Algorithms sparked my passion for Machine Learning; Robotics, IoT and Network Technologies showed me how far it can reach.
B.Sc. in Information Engineering 97/110
Università del Salento — Lecce, Italy
Thesis: Design and development of a back-end subsystem for an event-management service (Spring Boot REST).
Physics
Dept. of Mathematics and Physics “Ennio De Giorgi”, Lecce
Where I grew some of the soft skills that define me most: teamwork and communication.
Scientific High School
Liceo Scientifico “Cosimo De Giorgi”, Lecce
Research
Publications & preprints
Where classical and quantum computing meet climate science.
Quantum Machine Learning
Quantum Data Assimilation
Digital Twins
Wildfire Forecasting
HPC & Distributed Training
2026
First authorPreprint · Under review
From Classical to Quantum-Mechanical Data Assimilation: A Comparison between DATO and QMDA
Submitted to Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS), Special Collection on Advances in Quantum Computing: Methods, Algorithms, and Systems, Vol. III
2026
Journal article
interTwin: Advancing Scientific Digital Twins through AI, Federated Computing and Data
Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) — The International Journal of eScience
2025
EGU General Assembly
Facilitating the development of Machine Learning-based Digital Twin applications for extreme weather events
EGU General Assembly 2025
2024
EGU General Assembly
A Data Space environment for Big Data and ML-based Climate applications in the European Open Science Cloud
EGU General Assembly 2024
Projects
Selected work
From global-scale climate models to full-stack platforms and parallel algorithms.
ML4Fires — interTwin Digital Twin Engine
Core ML/DL component of an Environmental Digital Twin for global wildfire propagation, integrated into the EU interTwin platform, with a reproducible training pipeline distributed on HPC.
Global Soil-Moisture Downscaling
ML-based downscaling of satellite-derived soil-moisture products on the EASE 2.0 grid, with pipelines for multidimensional Earth-observation datasets.
Social Tech Platform
LinkedIn-style multi-user platform: Angular + Ionic frontend, Spring Boot REST backend, Firebase for push and bulk notifications. End-to-end ownership, from architecture to deployment.
MAD — My Accessible Data
Multi-user system for secure personal-data management using IOTA's Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) over the Tangle; Angular/Ionic frontend, Spring Boot REST backend.
Drupal Plugin for Remote Learning
Drupal content-management plugin backed by a Spring Boot service over a materialized-table relational schema, with an Angular web client and stored procedures for data exchange between backends.
Parallel Fast Hartley Transform
Parallel design and implementation of the one-dimensional Fast Hartley Transform (FHT) using the MPICH message-passing library.
COVID-19 Spread Modeling
Polynomial and multivariate regression plus Kalman filtering applied to COVID-19 spread, modeled with the SIR compartmental model.
Skills
Toolbox
The languages, frameworks and tools I reach for.
AI & ML
Quantum (PhD)
Languages
LLM & GenAI (personal projects)
Backend & Infra
Data & Storage
Frontend
Tools
Certifications & awards
Always learning
Jun 2026
Large Language Models (LLMs) Concepts
DataCamp
Jun 2026
Introduction to FastAPI
DataCamp
Jun 2026
Introduction to Power BI
DataCamp
May 2026
Quantum Machine Learning with Python & Qiskit
IBM SkillsBuild
Sep 2025
JUNIQ-EPIQ Summer School on Quantum Computing
Forschungszentrum Jülich — gate-based algorithms and quantum annealing
Jun 2024
Professional Engineering License
Order of Engineers of Lecce — Sec. A, Sector C
May 2022
ICIAP 2021
21st International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing
Jul 2019
IELTS Academic
Overall 6.0/9.0 — CEFR B2
Mar 2019
Samsung Innovation Camp
Innovation & Technology, Business Strategy, Digital Marketing
Contact
Let's build something,
classical or quantum.
Open to research collaborations, talks and interesting problems in ML, HPC and quantum computing.