Caldarelli received his Ph.D. from
SISSA, after which he was a postdoc in the Department of Physics and School of Biology,
University of Manchester. He then worked at the
Theory of Condensed Matter Group,
University of Cambridge, where he worked with
Robin Ball. He returned to Italy as a lecturer at the National Institute for Condensed Matter (INFM) and later as Primo Ricercatore in the Institute of Complex Systems of the
National Research Council of Italy. During this period, he was also the coordinator of the Networks subproject, part of the Complexity Project, for the
Fermi Centre. From 2012 to 2020, he was a professor at
IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. He also spent some terms at
University of Fribourg (Switzerland) and across 2003–2004, he has been visiting professor at
École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In CCS2018 (The Conference of Complex Systems Society), he was elected President of the Complex Systems Society for the mandate 2018–2021. From July 1, 2024, he is the Director of the Institute of Complex Systems of
National Research Council (Italy). ==Research==