Baldassare (Rino) Di Bartolo is a professor of physics at Boston College in Newton, Massachusetts, which he joined in 1968. He received his first degree, Dottore Ingegnere in industrial engineering, at the University of Palermo, Italy.

After some years in Italian industry and research he arrived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge Massachusetts, where he worked as a member of the "Foreign Student Summer Project," with a Fulbright grant and a scholarship from MIT.  He later returned to MIT as a visiting fellow in the department of physics, completing a Ph.D. in physics in 1964.

For the next four years Dr. Di Bartolo directed the spectroscopy laboratory of MITHRAS, then a division of Sanders Associates, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Prof. DiBartolo has spent his sabbatical years at the Laboratoire de Spectroscopie et Luminescence, Université Claude Bernard, Lyon (France); at the department of chemistry of MIT; and at the femtosecond spectroscopy laboratory of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He also spent a summer as fellow of American Society for Engineering Education Program at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

Since September 1973, Dr. Di Bartolo has been director of the International School of Atomic and Molecular Spectroscopy of the "Ettore Majorana" International Centre for Scientific Culture, which holds biannual "summer" schools.

Over the years at Boston College, Prof. Di Bartolo has directed more than 30 theses in physics (27 for the Ph.D.) while he published a large number of books and articles.

Dr. Di Bartolo is married to Rita.  They have two sons: John, a teacher of physics at the Polytechnic University of Brooklyn, and Daniel, a graduate student in biology at the Sloan Kettering Center in New York.  Daniel married Claudia Rincon, a young lady from Columbia.  The wedding was Sicilian style,in Erice, Sicily, in July 2003.