Paolo Giommi obtained his Italian degree of Laurea in Physics at the University of Milan in 1980. His professional career started at the end of 1980 when he moved to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (Cambridge, MA, USA) as an ESA research fellow. At CfA he worked mostly on X-ray data from the "Einstein Observatory" concentrating on studies of QSOs, BL Lacertae objects and X-ray surveys.
In 1982 he joined the EXOSAT Observatory team at the ESA establishment of ESOC in Darmstadt, Germany where he worked for over four years as a Duty Scientist, deeply involved in the scientific operations of the EXOSAT satellite and in the construction of the EXOSAT results database, one of the first astronomical archives to become available on-line. In Darmstadt he continued his research in the field of extragalactic X-ray astronomy and led the data analysis and follow up observations program of the EXOSAT High Galactic Latitude Survey. At the end of the EXOSAT operations Giommi moved to ESA-ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands where the EXOSAT group was relocated to complete the on-line archive as a service to the world-wide astronomical community. Giommi played a key role in the development of the EXOSAT on-line archive and in the construction of a number of multi-mission X-ray data analysis software packages, some of which are still in use (e.g. XIMAGE, BROWSE). In 1991 he joined the European Space Information System (ESIS) team, at ESA-ESRIN in Frascati, Italy as the ESIS Senior Scientist. In this period he collaborated with various international teams active in archival research, in particular with the HEASARC group with which he produced the ROSAT WGA (White Giommi and Angelini) catalog of soft X-ray sources. In July 1995 he joined the BeppoSAX project to set up and operate the BeppoSAX Science Data Center in Rome.
In 1998, as part of the BeppoSAX scientific team, he was awarded the Bruno Rossi prize, for the discovery of the X-ray afterglow of Gamma Ray Bursts.
In 2000 Giommi became responsible of the ASI Science Data Center, a multi-mission data archive facility, which supports BeppoSAX and other high energy missions, in particular Swift, AGILE and GLAST and hosts a copy of the public data from several international missions including Rosat, ASCA, XMM-Newton and Chandra.
More recently Paolo Giommi was given the responsibility of the scientific activities in the field of "High Energy Astrophysics and Cosmology" within the ASI unit "Observation of the Universe". Currently also acts as the italian Lead Scientist of the Simbol-X hard-X-ray mission.
He published many scientific papers on Active Galactic Nuclei, in particular on Blazars and on astronomical surveys.