Luca is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and ACM Fellow, and was awarded the Dahl-Nygaard Prize in 2007. He is a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford. Prior to that, he has worked at Bells Labs, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Microsoft Research Cambridge. He obtained his M.S. University of Pisa and his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh.

His research spans object-oriented foundations, type systems, module systems, distributed programming, spatial logics, semi-structured data, databases, computer architectures, and more recently, molecular programming and semantics, systems biology, biological models, and natural computability.