Riccardo Pighi was born in Piacenza, Italy, on November 28, 1976. He received the ``Laurea'' degree (5-year program) in Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Parma in Dicember 2002 discussing a thesis with title ``Reduction of noise effects in storage systems with linear prediction techniques'' (Riduzione degli effetti del rumore nei sistemi di memorizzazione mediante tecniche di predizione lineare).
From January 2003 he was a Ph.D. student at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione (DII) of the University of Parma, under the supervision of Prof. R. Raheli working on storage systems and collaborating with Selta S.p.A., Cadeo (PC), Italy, on power carrier modems. He received the Ph.D. degree in information technology from the University of Parma, in 2006, discussing a thesis with title ``On Power Line Communications'' (Comunicazioni su Linee Elettriche) .
He held a post doctorate position at the University of Parma from March 2006 to September 2007. Since 2003, he has been involved in the project of a multicarrier system for Power Line Communication (PLC) in collaboration with Selta S.p.A.. His main research interests are in the area of digital communication systems design, adaptive and multirate signal processing, storage systems, information theory and power line communications.
He served on the Techincal Program Committee (TPC) of the IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM 2008), New Orleans, U.S.A. and IEEE International Symposium on Power-Line Communications and Its Applications (ISPLC 2007), Pisa, Italy.
He is coauthor of the paper "Multidimensional Signal Processing and Detection for Storage Systems With Data Dependent Transition Noise" which received the "2006 Best Student Paper Award in Signal Processing and Coding for Data Storage" from the IEEE Communications Society in November 2007.
He joined the research staff at Selta, Roveleto di Cadeo, Piacenza in September 2007.