Raphael Zaccone received his MSc in naval architecture and marine engineering in 2013 from the University of Genoa. Subsequently, he received his PhD in 2017 with research on ship optimal weather routing, then continued his research in autonomous navigation and collision avoidance as a Post Doc. He joined the Department of Naval, Electrical, Electronic, and Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Genoa in 2019 as a Research Fellow and, from 2021, Assistant Professor. His research activities cover various areas of ship digitization and mainly focus on developing and applying optimization techniques and algorithms to marine problems such as collision avoidance, enhanced and autonomous navigation, marine power plant automation, and operational and design decision support.