Professor Massimo Franceschetti's research interests are in Physical Models, Algorithms, and Protocols of Large Scale Networks. He is interested the specific areas of Phase transitions and critical phenomena, Random Networks, Wave propagation in random media, and Wireless communication.

Born in Naples, Italy, Professor Franceschetti graduated magna cum laude in computer engineering from the University of Naples in 1997. He received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1999, and 2003 respectively. His doctoral thesis, entitled "Wireless Networks, from Collective Behavior to the Physics of Propagation" was awarded the Wilts Prize for best thesis in electrical engineering at Caltech in 2003. He also received the 2000 Walker von Brimer award for outstanding research at Caltech and the 2005 S.A. Schelkunoff Transactions prize paper award from the IEEE Antennas and Propagation society (jointly with profs. J. Bruck and L. J. Shulman) for his work on wave propagation and scattering based on random walk theory. Franceschetti has held visiting positions at at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, and the University of Trento in Italy. Before joining UCSD, he was a post-doctoral scholar at University of California at Berkeley for two years.