Riccardo Barbieri received his undergraduate education in 1963-67 at the
Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and at the
University of Pisa. His
laurea advisor was
Pietro Menotti. During his professionalization classes (
perfezionamento) in 1967-69 at the Scuola Normale Superiore and in later years he worked on higher-order radiative corrections in
Quantum Electrodynamics with
Ettore Remiddi. In the 1970s he turned to computations in
Quantum Chromodynamics, collaborating in particular with
Raoul Gatto and
Zoltan Kunszt. In 1976 at
CERN, he made the prediction, later experimentally verified, of the hadronic widths of the three
charmonium P-waves. In 1980-82, Riccardo Barbieri was a staff member at the
CERN Theory Division. The
Standard Model of particle physics by then well established, he started focussing on models
beyond the Standard Model, in particular
supersymmetry. In 1982, he formulated the first realistic model of mediation of supersymmetry breaking via supergravity. Since 1984 and until now, Riccardo Barbieri has been the professor of theoretical physics at Pisa, first at the University of Pisa (1984–97), and then at the Scuola Normale Superiore (1998–present). Some of his most influential results in this period include: • In 1988, the quantitative formulation of the naturalness concept in supersymmetric models. • In 1990, the formulation of a reference parametrization of the quantum corrections to the electroweak precision observables. • In 1995, pointing out the significance of flavour and CP violations in supersymmetric unified theories even in the absence of any flavour or CP violation in the input for the soft-supersymmetry breaking parameters. • In 2006, the proposal of a Dark Matter model based on a second Higgs doublet without vacuum expectation value. ==Mentoring==