Roberto Natalini was born in Rome in 1960. He graduated in mathematics in 1983 from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and then obtained a PhD in research from the University of Bordeaux I, France, in 1986. He became a researcher at CNR IAC in 1988. In the academic year 1998-99, he was an associate professor at the Department of Mathematics “G. Castelnuovo” of the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. Since 1999, he has been a research Director at CNR. He has been the Director of IAC since 2014. Since 2015, he has been a member of the Scientific Committee of the Italian Mathematical Union (Unione Matematica Italiana). He has published over 140 articles in international journals, as well as several articles on scientific and popular science activities and publications in the proceedings of international congresses. His research interests range from analytical and numerical investigations of evolutionary differential equations for modeling and simulating complex phenomena in physics, chemistry, biology, and social sciences, to the numerical approximation of models in finance and traffic flows on networks. He also deals with intracellular dynamics, signal propagation within the cell, immunological-based cancer therapies, models of selection and mutation in biological populations, diffusion problems in porous media and interactions with damage, chemical damage on stone and copper surfaces, biofilm growth and biodeterioration, and mathematics pedagogy.
He is actively involved in the dissemination and communication of mathematics. Since 2009, he has been the creator and coordinator of the mathematical dissemination project MaddMaths!, a web site and community for professionals, students, teachers, and simple math enthusiasts, and director of the magazine for teachers and scholars of pure and applied mathematics Archimede (Mondadori Education). Moreover, together with the mathematician and editor Andrea Plazzi, he created in 2012 the Comics&Science series published by CNR Edizioni to promote, through scientific comics, the relationship between science and society. From 2015 to 2022, he was President of the Outreach Committee of the European Mathematical Society.