Ludovico Pontecorvo was born in Italy and achieved his master’s degree in physics at the University of Rome in 1989. While writing his thesis, Pontecorvo spent a year and a half at CERN as a technical student. During this period, he worked at the UA1 experiment, a particle detector of the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS).
After completing his studies, Pontecorvo joined the High-Energy Physics Group of INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics) in Rome, where he was hired as a staff member in 1993. He continued to collaborate with CERN and for many years divided his time between Rome and Geneva. From 1996 to 2001, Pontecorvo also collaborated with the National Laboratories of Frascati in Italy, where he was part of an experiment called KLOE that focused on K mesons.
In 1990, Pontecorvo worked on developing detector ideas for EAGLE, one of the projects then being proposed for the Large Hadron Collider. EAGLE later merged with another project to create the ATLAS Experiment known today. At ATLAS, Pontecorvo contributed to the construction of the tracking chambers for the muon spectrometer. In 2005, he came to CERN to work on the installation and commissioning of the barrel muon spectrometer and, from 2008 to 2014, he was the ATLAS Muon System Project Leader.
On 1 June 2015, Pontecorvo was nominated ATLAS Technical Coordinator. In this position, he monitors and coordinates the activities of all the subsystems of the detector, and is responsible for the overall technical performance, planning and scheduling of the experiment.