Senior Research Associate leading the Railway Systems Research Group at NewRail, Roberto has a background in Mechanical Engineering, Design and Railway Systems Engineering. He has been involved in research projects on subjects such as development of innovative railway concepts, innovative intermodal systems, urban transport, intermodality of the European rail network and development of modular concepts for high-speed.

Research interests include improving railways energy efficiency, mobility and mass-capacity, connectivity and the development of ergonomic and design-led railway environments.

He led a MarieCurie RTN on composite materials in transport and coordinated the EC-funded project SafeInteriors (Train Interior Passive Safety for Europe). He is currently Principal Investigator (PI)/CO-I for Viajeo Plus (International Coordination for implementation of innovative and efficient urban mobility solutions), OSIRIS (Optimal strategy to innovate and reduce energy consumption in urban rail systems), MERLIN (Sustainable and intelligent management of energy for smarter railway systems in Europe: an integrated optimisation approach), SafeCap+ (SafeCap for integrated optimum capacity, safety, and energy strategies at multiple nodes) and Z_LIM (Zero slip linear motor for optimise braking capacity). .

In MERLIN he is involved in research on developing operational and strategic approaches to improve the energy efficiency of railways. Roberto's input to OSIRIS is related to the definition and development of operational requirements and needs for urban rail systems as well as the integration of technical results and economic assessment for Decision Support. In SafeCap+ he is part of a multidisciplinary team at Newcastle University co-led with Prof Romanovsky (School of Computing Science) aiming to develop real-time network optimisation tools exploring the trade-off between capacity, safe and energy usage.