Sergio Cerutti has always operated in the area of Biomedical Engineering. In 1982 he became Associate Professor in this topic at the Politecnico, Milano and in 1990 Professor at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and then back to the Politecnico, Milano, from 1994. In 2000-2006: Chairman of the Department of Bioengineering of the Politecnico; in 1995-1998: Chairman of Undergraduate Program in Biomedical Engineering and in the period 1998-2000 Vice-Chairman of the Graduate Program in Biomedical Engineering in the same Politecnico; actually (from 2010) he is the Chairman of the Programs in Biomedical Engineering.
He has had a strong background in both signal processing techniques and system and control theory and his most important contribution has been to develop research activity and didactical courses in which the modeling aspects of biological systems had a deep interaction with advanced signal processing techniques. In particular, he studied the control mechanisms of cardiovascular system from the variability signals in heart rate, blood pressure and respiration, by using open- and closed-loop identification algorithms and parametric methods of spectral estimation. Besides important physiological findings, such an approach has brought fundamental contributions in the diagnosis of important pathologies like hypertension, myocardial infarction, diabetic neuropathy, in monitoring the critically ill patient, in dialysis treatment etc, as it is demonstrated by various cooperative researches carried out by his group with Italian and foreign medical institutions. More recently, he has applied the same approach of data and signal processing and modeling towards the fulfilling of the so-called 4M-integration paradigm: i.e. integrating biosignals in a Multivariate, Multiorgan, Multimodal and Multiscale approach, in order to have a better comprehension of the complex pathophysiological involvement, through an olistic vision. He spent more than one year at Harvard School of Public Health, Beth Israel Hospital, Boston, USA and at MIT Health Science and Technology Department, Boston, USA in two periods in the ‘80’s. He was also Visiting Professor for a period of four months at IST University – Department of Physics, Lisbon, Portugal in 2008-2009.
He has been Elected Member of IEEE-EMBS AdCom (Region 8) in the period 1993-1996. He is actually Fellow Member of IEEE and of EAMBES and Associate Editor of IEEE Trans BME. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the IEEE-EMBS Summer School on Biomedical Signal Processing: he was the local organiser of four Summer Schools held in Siena. He is the Author of more than 500 international scientific contributions (more than 250 on indexed scientific journals). His h-index is around 42, with a total citations of about 15,500. His most-cited paper is the Task Force on HRV, 1996, the 3rd most cited paper on Circulation [more than 4000 citations].
In his more than 35-year long career at University he has mentored a few hundreds of PhD students, graduate and undergraduate students in Electrical Engineering and especially in Biomedical Engineering: many of them are actually working inside the research environment (Full Professors, Associate Professors and Assistant Professors as well as Research Fellows and post-docs) in Italy as well as worldwide. Others have followed a career inside companies (mainly of electromedical equipments and devices) as well as in the clinical engineering activity or the free-lance profession.