About your PhD coach

Dr. Buffone holds a Master in Aerospace Engineering from Università di Roma La Sapienza (2000), and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from The University of Edinburgh (2004). During the doctorate, Dr. Buffone enjoyed a lot what writing a paper brings. Right after the PhD degree, he moved to industry and, for nearly eight years, he spanned sectors as diverse as microelectronic cooling, aeroengines, and escalators, always working in applied research. In 2012 he re-joined academia and had not left it since. The paper writing efforts have decreased in numbers but increased in intensity and variety. In all these years, he worked in the UK, Germany, Belgium, and even China, where he supervised or co-supervised tens of students at Master and PhD level. He also managed a number of post-docs. And this is where his interest in PhD coaching started.

To date, he co-authored 29 journal papers, some of which have attracted a rather high number of citations and few of which even became standard in the field. He worked in subjects as diverse as evaporation, heat pipes, seals, shape memory alloys, composite fins, condensation, drops, liquid lenses, capillary rise dynamics, and magnetic refrigeration. Over the years, Dr. Buffone has secured around € 4.5 m of funding at the country and European level. He also holds 5 patents, 4 of which from his time in industry.

From 2020 Dr. Buffone is also an Associate Editor Microgravity and regularly reviews manuscripts submitted to a number of publishers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Since the fall of 2020, Dr. Buffone has dived into that complex science of how humans learn and why they learn. The wide spectrum of learning techniques combined with the emotional attachment to learning by students is helping him shaping also the way coaching for PhD students should be more tailored to students. These efforts are trialled at the secondary school level where behavioural issues overlap with the way students learn. At this level, all the learning experience is massively shaped by the teaching techniques. Going along this path is shaping enormously Dr. Buffone’s strategies on how to massively improve PhD coaching experiences.

PhD coaching is the primary focus of Dr. Buffone’s activities. However, Dr. Buffone still likes to be actively involved in doing research and, from time to time, in taking joy in writing a research paper. After all, a PhD coach who is ‘disconnected’ from research, might not serve well the coachees.

There is a specifically built YouTube channel dedicated to the PhD Blog page of this website which you should NOT miss.

Additionally, follow the weekly updates on the newly launched Facebook page where you will find news about our activities on PhD coaching.

And finally, Dr. Buffone’s main interests outside science are reading (history, philosophy, history of religion, psychology), fiction writing, riding his bicycle, brisk walking, listening to rock ‘n roll, and playing bass guitar.