Nicola obtained his Master cum laude in Mechanical Engineering at Polytechnic University of Bari (Italy). Consequently, he took up a PhD studentship in Tribology, funded by GE Avio, at the same institute. During his PhD, he was Visiting PhD student for 8 months in the Tribology group at Imperial College London. His PhD thesis dealt with the effect of adhesion and friction in periodic contacts of elastic and viscoelastic thin layers. After the PhD, he spent three years post-doc at Polytechnic University of Bari working con contact mechanics, adhesion and viscoelasticity of layered and multilayer materials. At the same time, he was Visiting Academic in the Tribology group at Imperial College, working in tight collaboration with Prof. Dini and Dr. Reddyhoff. From 2019 to 2021, he was granted a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the Tribology group at Imperial College London (UK) to develop contact models for thin soft materials. In 2020, he gained a Senior Lectureship at the Polytechnic University of Bari. In 2023 he became Associate Professor of Applied Mechanics in the same university. His research interests mainly consist in tribological characterization and modelling of elastic and viscoelastic interfaces, with specific focus the contact mechanics, adhesion, friction, viscoelastic dissipation, and wettability. Other topics of scientific interest involve the nonlinear dynamics of multi-DoF in seismic isolators with viscoelastic nonlinear damping, and friction control.