Tamassia received a
laurea (the Italian equivalent of an M.S. degree) from the
University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 1984, and a Ph.D. from the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of
Franco Preparata in 1988. He then took a faculty position at Brown; he has also held visiting positions at the
University of Texas at Dallas, the
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, and La Sapienza. He was one of the original organizers of the
International Symposium on Graph Drawing, and was co-chair of that conference in 1994; he has also been co-chair of the semiannual
Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures (1997, 1999, and 2001) and the annual Workshop on Algorithms and Experiments (2005). He is founding editor-in-chief (since 1996) of the
Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications as well as belonging to several other journal editorial boards. ==Awards and honors==