Paolo Atzeni is Database Professor and Vice-Rector for Education at Università Roma Tre, where he was Head of the Department of Engineering from 2012 to 2017. He received his Dr. Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from Università di Roma "La Sapienza" in 1980. Before joining Università Roma Tre, he was with IASI-CNR in Rome, then a faculty member at Università di Napoli and later a professor at Università di Roma La Sapienza. He also had visiting appointments at the University of Toronto, at Università dell'Aquila and at Microsoft Research. 

He has worked on various topics in the database field, including relational database theory, conceptual models and design tools, deductive databases, databases and the Web, model management, cooperation of database systems. He is the founder of the database group at Roma Tre, which includes five faculty members and various postdocs and students. They collaborate with various groups in Italy and abroad, on topics that include data models, data warehouses, data in the Web world.

He was Vicepresident of the VLDB Endowment and President of the Executive Board of the EDBT Association.