Simone Notarnicola got his bachelor’s and master's degree in Physics at the University of Bari in 2011 and 2014 respectively. During his master’s thesis, he studied lattice gauge theories and novel strategies to investigate them based on the realization of quantum simulators. This idea, formulated by Feynman in a seminal work in 1982, motivates nowadays intense research to realize controllable quantum systems that can be used to investigate unknown quantum phenomena. After his master’s degree, Simone Notarnicola got his PhD at the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, working on periodically-driven quantum many-body systems and exploring numerical techniques to characterize chaos in quantum systems. Since 2018 he is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padua where he studies quantum simulation platforms, such as Rydberg atom lattices, via tensor network numerical simulations. As a Global Marie Curie Fellow, he will join, during the outgoing phase, the group led by Professor Mikhail Lukin at Harvard University, where the world-leading experiments with Rydberg atoms are performed. Then, during the return phase at the University of Padua under the supervision of Professor Simone Montangero, he will acquire expertise in quantum optimal control to fruitfully merge the new expertise acquired on advanced quantum simulation experimental platforms and tensor network numerical simulation techniques.