After graduating in physics from the First University of Rome, La Sapienza, Franco Manfredi moved to the Milan Polytechnic to work with Emilio Gatti. At the Polytechnic, in 1976, he became a full professor of Nuclear Electronics. He was also a full professor of Electronics at the University of Milan and at the University of Pavia. That was before joining, in 1997, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, as a senior staff scientist.
During his scientific career, Franco oriented his research interests to radiation detectors, detector signal processing, noise limits in electron devices and front-end electronics for different detector applications. He led international projects in the area of low-noise front-end systems for the acquisition and processing of signals from radiation detectors in nuclear and elementary particle physics. His work was strongly inspired by his belief that front-end electronics developments are among the main forces responsible for the progress in physics.