Nicola Blefari-Melazzi has been a full professor of telecommunications at the University of Rome Tor Vergata since 2002, where he held the positions of Coordinator of the PhD course in Telecommunications Engineering (2003-2008), Chairman of the Course Council in Telecommunications Engineering (2008-2010) and Director of the Department of Electronic Engineering (2010-2016). Since 2017, he has been Director of CNIT (National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications), a non-profit organisation that groups together 41 public universities. CNIT employs more than 1,300 researchers from the consortium universities and around 100 researchers and technicians.
His research projects have been funded by various ministries, the CNR, major industries (e.g. Cisco, Ericsson, Siemens, Telecom Italia, Vodafone), the ASI, ESA and the European Union. He participated in 33 European projects, serving as project coordinator for seven of them. He was one of the six elected members (out of more than a thousand members) for the research sector of the board of the 5G Infrastructure Association, the private component of the European Commission's 5G Public-Private Partnership, which has funded research into the next generation of telecommunications networks and services with EUR 1.4 billion. He is currently a member of the 6G Infrastructure Association, the natural continuation of its predecessor, which set up the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking together with the European Commission and is funding the development of 6G and related technologies with 900 billion euros. Since October 2021, he has been a member of the Quadrato della Radio. In 2022 he was appointed by the MUR as Italy's representative in the Member States' Representatives Group of the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking. Since September 2022 he has been President of the RESTART Foundation, set up primarily for the implementation, coordination and management of the 'Telecommunications of the Future' research programme, funded by the MUR with 116 M€. He was the creator and general chair of 5G Italy.
He served on numerous occasions as a project reviewer and evaluator of project proposals, in regional, national and European contexts. His research interests have included the performance evaluation, design and control of integrated broadband networks, local area and wireless networks, satellite networks and the Internet. He is author/co-author of about 260 papers, which have appeared in international journals and in peer-reviewed international conference proceedings.