Born in 1928 in Catania and passed away in 2022 in Milan, Emanuele Biondi is one of the main responsible for the dissemination and development of Bioengineering at the Politecnico di Milano and in Italy, as well as mentor of an esteemed and active generation of bioengineers.
Already a disciple of Ercole Bottani, one of the “founding fathers” of what is now the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Emanule Biondi officially began his career at the Politecnico di Milano in 1964, when he began teaching Electrical Engineering, first as Tenure Professor and then, starting from 1967, as Full Professor. In 1978 he abandoned the chair of Electrical Engineering and started teaching Bioengineering of Sensory Systems, the first Bioengineering course in Italy. Since then, he has taught numerous innovative courses related to Automation Engineering, Systems Theory and Bioengineering.
In addition to his teaching activity, Emanuele Biondi’s intellectual legacy is also linked to his role as founder and director of various teaching and/or research structures. In particular, in 1967 he founded and directed for over twenty years the Systems Theory Center of the National Research Center (CNR), a forge of studies and research on Bioengineering and its applications to healthcare and medicine, general mathematical theories, and economics, on corporate organization, on automation, and, more than fifty years in advance, on the environment and the effects of its mutations. These researches represented a fundamental contribution to the birth of the degree courses in Biomedical Engineering, Management Engineering, Automation Engineering and Environmental Engineering. For a few years, he also directed the Automatic Controls Laboratory of the Politecnico di Milano.
In the early 80s he founded the National Bioengineering Group of the CNR. In 1982 he founded the PhD course in Bioengineering at the Politecnico di Milano, in collaboration with the universities of Genoa, Padua, Pavia and Pisa (the first in Italy together with the one founded in the same year at the University of Bologna). In 1981, he promoted the Annual School of Bioengineering, which since then has been held every year on September in Bressanone and has now reached its forty-first edition.
In 1990, he left the direction of the CNR Systems Theory Center, assuming, at its establishment, the direction of the Bioengineering Department of the Politecnico di Milano. On his initiative, the current degree course in Biomedical Engineering was born in 2000. The year after his retirement, which took place in 2003, he became Professor Emeritus and continued to teach a Bioelectricity and Biomagnetism course for several years, passing on his teachings to several hundred young students.
During his long career, Emanuele Biondi was the mentor of a team of researchers who later became famous all over the world and were affectionately nicknamed “Prof. Biondi’s Magnificent Seven”. They are Francesco Brioschi, Adriano De Maio (Rector of the Politecnico di Milano from 1994 to 2002 and of the LUISS University of Rome from 1992 to 1995), Luigi Divieti (who passed away in 1994, and to whom is dedicated the Posture and Movement Analysis Laboratory of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering), Guido Guardabassi, Arturo Locatelli, Sergio Rinaldi and Roberto Schmid (Rector of the University of Pavia from 1988 to 2005).
In addition to the “Magnificent Seven”, disciples of Emanuele Biondi are also recognized by a very large number of teachers and researchers who have carried out and still carry out their research activities in Italian universities and in the CNR, and who have built and still contribute to building the science and the foundations of Bioengineering in Italy.