Prof. Marco Ruffini received his M.Eng. in telecommunications engineering in 2002 from Polytechnic University of Marche, Italy.

After working as a research scientist for Philips in Germany, he joined Trinity College Dublin in 2005, where he received his Ph.D. in 2007.
He is currently full professor at TCD.

He is Principal Investigator (PI) of both the CONNECT Telecommunications Research Centre at TCD, and the IPIC photonics integration centre headquartered at the national Tyndall institute. Prof. Ruffini is currently involved in several Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and H2020 projects, leads the Optical and Radio Network Architecture group at Trinity College Dublin .

His main research is in the area of 5G optical networks, where he carries out pioneering work on the convergence of fixed-mobile and access-metro networks, and on the virtualisation of next generation networks, and has been invited to share his vision through several keynote and talks at major international conferences across the world and the OpenIreland beyond 5G testbed research infrastructure. He has recently started working also on quantum networking where he is collaborating with the US Centre for Quantum Networks (CQN).

He authored over 180 international publications, 10 patents, contributed to industry standards and secured research funding for over € 10 milion, and contributed is novel virtual Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation (vDBA) concept to the BroadBand Forum standardisation body.