Paolo Boccotti is a Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the Mediterranean University of Reggio Calabria in Italy, where he has been since 1986. Highlights of his career include him founding the university's School of Marine Engineering and the NOEL laboratory for small-scale field experiments from scratch.

Boccotti has authored over 30 papers for prestigious journals such as Ocean Engineering, the Journal of Waterway, Port, Coastal and Ocean Engineering, the Journal of Fluid Mechanics and the Journal of Geophysical Research, and in 2000 he published the first edition of 'Wave Mechanics for Ocean Engineering' with Elsevier