I joined Heriot-Watt University in July 2019 as an Associate Professor. Prior to moving to Edinburgh, I spent more than 6 years at ICFO, the Institute of Photonic Sciences of Barcelona, as a reserch fellow. There I led the Solid-State Quantum Memories project within the group of ICREA professor Hugues de Riedmatten, my research activity being devoted to developing novel solid-state devices to generate, store and on-demand retrieved quantum states of lights for quantum communication applications. In the course of my PhD and during a post-doc appointment, both spent at the University of Parma, I studied light-matter interaction, in the classical regime, in insulating materials doped with rare earth ions. I also had different post-doctoral experiences on the optical characterization of 1-dimentional semiconductors at the Institute for Electronics and Magnetism Materials (IMEM-CNR) in Parma and in the theoretical description of charge transport phenomena in superconductors.