Recently entitled to the name of the renowned scientist Ettore Pancini (who taught here for about 20 years), the Physics Department  is currently the one with the largest number of academic staff among Physics Departments in Italy. The Department goal is the development of scientific culture and the academic training up to the Ph.D. level in its reference fields.

The strength of the Department is the possibility to share within one single institution human and computing resources, Laboratories and infrastructures needed for the scientific, didactic, training and educational activities of its members. With more than 120 academic staff members and about 80 post-doc and Ph.D. students, covering all of the main Physics research fields, the Department  is currently involved in several collaborations with Italian as well as international research institutions. We cite here among others the ones with INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare), and with CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche), the Napoli section of INFN and the Napoli unit of CNR's SPIN (Istituto Superconduttori, Matariali Innovativi e Dispositivi) being hosted inside the "Ettore Pancini" Department buildings.

Other collaborations include the Vesuvio's Observatory (Osservatorio Vesuviano ,INGV), the Astronomical Observatory (Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte, INAF) and the istitutes of CNR ISASI (Istituto di Scienze Applicate & Sistemi Intelligenti) and IMAA (Istituto di Metodologie per l'Analisi Ambientale).