Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) is a Foundation governed by Articles 14 et seq of the Italian Civil Code, established by Legislative Decree 269/03, converted by Law no. 326/2003 (Article 4 of the Statute), and financed by the State to conduct scientific research in the public interest, for the purpose of technological development. IIT long-term vision consist in promoting excellence in basic and applied research, in order to support the development of the national economy.
IIT focuses on 4 main strategic areas of research: 1) Robotics, aimed at advancing the state of the art by developing new robotic platforms in hardware and software; 2) Nanomaterials, including new sustainable/biodegradable materials, nanocomposites, 2D materials, nanofabrication technologies and nanodevices, and new colloidal chemistry approaches; 3) LifeTech (Technologies for Lifescience), devoted to develop advanced genetic, molecular, electrophysiological, computational, imaging, and perturbation tools for dissecting the microscopic neural processes underlying brain function; 4) Computational Sciences, focused on massive simulations of physical systems and data analysis in general, including images, videos and sounds.
IIT Central Research Laboratories are based in Genoa, with a network of 11 centers throughout Italy nested in the most important Italian universities and 2 outstations in the USA in collaboration with MIT and Harvard University.