In a Nutshell. Prof. Dr. Michele Lanza is full professor at the Faculty of Informatics of USI, the "Università della Svizzera italiana" in Lugano, Switzerland. He is the head of the REVEAL Research Group, which he founded in 2004. His research interests are in software engineering, and in the specific areas of software evolution, visualization, maintenance, and comprehension.
In 2017 he founded the Software Institute, which he directed until the end of 2024.

Here are his curriculum vitae and list of publications.

Becoming an academic. Lanza was born in Italy and raised in the Swiss-German region of Switzerland. He completed his Master's degree in Computer Science at the University of Bern in 1999, with minors in Mathematics and Microelectronics. In 2003, under the supervision of Oscar Nierstrasz and Stéphane Ducasse, he earned his PhD summa cum laude — a thesis that also received the Ernst Denert Software Engineering Award for best PhD thesis in the field.
Following postdoctoral work at the Universities of Bern and Zurich, he joined USI in Fall 2004 as a founding member of the Faculty of Informatics, was promoted to Full Professor in 2013, and has served as Dean of the Faculty (2013–2015) and Pro-Rector of USI (2017–2019).

REVEAL & Research. Lanza founded REVEAL (Reverse Engineering, Visualization, Evolution Analysis Lab) upon joining USI in 2004. The group has since established itself among the top software engineering research groups worldwide. Of the 14 PhD students he has supervised, several have become prominent academics — Romain Robbes, Mircea Lungu, Alberto Bacchelli, and Bin Lin among them — while others have gone on to distinguished industry careers.

Publication Record. Lanza's research output stands at close to 300 publications, earning him numerous best paper, most influential paper, and best tool demo awards. His most cited work, Object-Oriented Metrics in Practice (2006, with Radu Marinescu), has surpassed 1,400 citations. His research has always been tool-driven, yielding high-visibility contributions such as CodeCrawler, CodeCity, Prompter, and CodeTube.

The Software Institute. In 2017, Prof. Lanza founded the USI Software Institute — backed by a major external donation he secured — with the mission of building a premier center of excellence for software engineering research and education.

CodeLounge The Software Institute was founded on the conviction that research and practice should be inseparable. CodeLounge, established in 2018 and directed by Marco D'Ambros, puts that conviction into action — functioning as the institute's applied software research and development hub, with Lanza as co-director.

Teaching & Curriculum Design. In teaching, Lanza holds a distinction unique in Switzerland: the Credit Suisse Award for Best Teaching, received twice, in 2007 and 2009. His influence extends equally to curriculum design — he shaped the USI Bachelor in Informatics for over a decade and created two Master's programs, the Master in Software Design (2007) and the Master in Software & Data Engineering (2017).