Dr. Coco graduated in Physics at the University of Pavia (Italy) in 2000, with an experimental thesis on the characterisation of a sensor for detection of buried explosives based on nuclear techniques. Then he completely changed topics, and began to work on ionospheric physics and magnetosphere – ionosphere coupling, mainly by means of ground based HF radars (SuperDARN network). After the PhD in Polar Sciences, obtained in 2005 at the University of Siena (Italy), he continued working as a Research Fellow in Rome, at INAF-IAPS. In 2009, he was project manager for the construction of the Italian SuperDARN radar Dome C East, at the Concordia station, in Antarctica.
In 2012 dr. Coco joined the ESA ground segment team of the Swarm mission, supervising the quality assessment of plasma data and coordinating the Electric Field Instrument Expert Group.
Since December 2016, Dr. Coco has a permanent research position at the "Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia" (INGV), in Rome. His main field of study is Space Weather, through the analysis of ionospheric parameters (electron density and temperature, plasma convection and electric field) both in situ (satellite measurements) and from ground (coherent scatter radars), following impulsive changes in the interplanetary medium (e.g. shocks, geomagnetic storms, ionospheric storms).