Federico Gobbo's research explores the role of artificiality in languages intended in a broad sense, including not only international auxiliary languages like Esperanto and Volapük and constructed languages for fictional purposes like Star Trek's Klingon, but also lesser used and minority languages in the process of being revitalised and promoted (process of 'Ausbauization') like Frisian and Piedmontese. Moreover, he investigates the ontological and epistemological commitment of formal languages, in particular those designed for computer programming.

Gobbo was appointed teaching fellow in Language Planning and Planned Languages at the University of Turin (Italy) in 2011. Prior to that, he had been appointed teaching fellow in the History and Philosophy of Computing at the University of Insubria (Italy). During the 2012-2013 academic year, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of L'Aquila (Italy), with a research focus in the field of Community Informatics. In 2012, he was a visiting professor at the Nanjing University (China). Gobbo previously also held two grants in the fields of distance learning and new texts at the University of Insubria (Italy), where he defended his PhD in Computer Science (2009) with a dissertation delving into constructive mathematical linguistics. In addition, he has also been a teaching assistant in Linguistics at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy).

Gobbo has co-authored (with Marco Benini) a monograph in constructive adpositional grammars and has published several essays and papers on his research interests. He has been book review editor of the journal Language Problems and Language Planning (John Benjamins) since 2005. In 1999, the Ivo Lapenna Foundation (Copenhagen, Denmark) awarded Gobbo the Lapenna Prize for that year’s best Master's thesis in Interlinguistics and Esperanto.