Gianfranco Rossi received a degree in Computer Science from the University of Pisa in 1979. From 1981 to 1983 he was employed at Intecs Co. System House in Pisa. From 1983 to 1989 he was a researcher at the University of Turin and from 1989 to 2001 he was an Associate Professor at the Universities of Udine, Bologna, and Parma. Since November 2001 he has been a Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of Parma. On November 2021 he has retired.

His research activity has been mainly devoted to Artificial Intelligence and Programming Languages, with special care to Logic Programming Languages. In the field of Artificial Intelligence he has worked on extended unification algorithms and on Knowledge Representation formalisms based on Prolog. In the field of Programming Languages he worked initially on concurrent and distributed programming; later on he worked on language issues in Logic Programming languages (such as the introduction of constructs for structured programming and meta-programming). More recently, he has turned his interests to the definition and development of languages and solvers dealing with set constraints and to the integration of such notions and tools, within both Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) languages and as libraries in imperative object-oriented languages (namely, Java).

Gianfranco Rossi was the local coordinator of several projects funded by C.N.R. and Ministero dell'Universita' e della Ricerca, mainly dealing with conventional and not-conventional programming languages.

He was the responsible of various teaching and scientific initiatives, among which the organization of two International Workshops on "(Declarative) Programming with Sets" and an International School on "Advances in Logic Programming".

From November 2002 to November 2009 he was the coordinator of the Degree in Computer Science at the University of Parma.

He is founding member of the Italian Association of Logic Programming (GULP) and from 1985 to 2006 he was member of the Board of the Association, and from December 2006 to December 2012 President of the Association.

From 2013 to 2018 he was member of the Board of the "Consorzio Interuniversitario Nazionale per l'Informatica (CINI)", and from 2013 to 2021 he was member of the Scientific Council of "Gruppo Nazionale per il Calcolo Scientifico (GNCS)".