At Berkeley Luca was the 2002 recipient of the Demetri Angelakos Memorial Achievement Award in recognition of altruistic attitude towards fellow graduate students. In 2006 Luca received a National Science Foundation "Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award" and in 2008 he was selected as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow.
His research interests are in the area of design tools and methodologies for integrated circuits and systems, distributed embedded systems design, and design of high-performance computer systems. Luca coauthored over fifty refereed papers and holds one patent.