After receiving an MD degree summa cum laude at the University of Florence, Italy, I moved to the University of Washington, Seattle, where I finished my residency in pathology and spent three years as NIH NRSA post-doctoral fellow in Tom Wight laboratory. In 1982 I was recruited by the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia where I had a rapid career being promoted to Associate Professor within 6 years, in July 1988. Two months later I moved to Thomas Jefferson University as a Tenured Professor. In 2014, I received the Gonzalo Aponte Endowed Chair Professorship. I have over 30 year of continuous NIH funding to study the role of proteoglycans in cancer biology and tumor angiogenesis, particularly focusing on the biology of decorin and perlecan. Our research program has been at the forefront of innovation and is one of the most cited worldwide within the matrix biology and proteoglycan community, with >56,000 citations and an h-index of 124. I was President of both the International and the American Societies for Matrix Biology, and Chair of the Gordon Research on Proteoglycans. I was the Editor-In-Chief of Matrix Biology for 9 years. Under my leadership, Matrix Biology is now the top-ranked journal in the field with a 2020 impact factor of 11.57. Based on my research achievements and continuous contribution to science, I was awarded two honorary doctoral degrees, one from Semmelweis University, Hungary, in 2011, and one from the University of Patras, Greece, in 2016.