Filippo Giorgi obtained a Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, in 1986. From 1986 to 1998 he was a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. In 1998 he moved to the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, Italy, where he is the head of the Earth System Physics (ESP) section.
Giorgi has authored over 420 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals and is one of the most cited scientists in the geosciences. In 2020 a study by Stanford University based on multiple bibliometric indicators placed him as number 11 (out of 54940) in the list of most influencial scientists in the field of Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics. Giorgi contributed to the first 5 reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). From 2002 to 2008 he was one of the vice chairs of Working Group I of the IPCC, which won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Among his awards is the 2018 Alexander von Humboldt medal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in recognition of his outstanding contributions to climate research and to the progress of science in developing countries.