Visiting Professors & Guest Scholars

Frank den Hollander is Professor Emeritus of Probability at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He received a PhD in Mathematical Physics from Leiden University in 1985. He subsequently held positions in the mathematics departments of the universities of Delft, Utrecht, Nijmegen, Eindhoven (where in 2000-2005 he was scientific director of EURANDOM) and Leiden. He has served on many national and international scientific advisory boards, and is member of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences. In 2011 he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant. His research focuses on systems consisting of a large number of random components that interact with each other locally yet exhibit a global dependence, resulting in phase transitions and associated critical behavior. Typically, the components of these systems are subject to a simple microscopic dynamics. The challenge lies in understanding the complex macroscopic phenomena that arise from this dynamics. Systems of interest include polymer chains, interacting particle systems, porous media, random processes in random media, and complex networks.

Roberto Livi is honorary Professor at the University of Florence and the President of the Italian Statistical Physics Society (SIFS). He is an expert of the foundations of quantum mechanics, statistical field theory, statistical mechanics, dynamical systems, complex systems, quantum systems, models of biological interest, and the history of physics. He has a long track record of impactful publications on peer-reviewed international journals, several invited talks at major conferences worldwide, and  many organized events of relevance for the national and international physics community. He has been visiting several research centers and institutions as an invited researcher, including the Department of Theoretical Physics of the University of Edinburgh, the Universidad Nacional Autonoma in Mexico City, the Institute des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in Paris, the Departement de Physique Theorique de l'Université de Geneve, the Departement de Physique Theorique de l'Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, the Centre de Physique Theorique du CNRS in Luminy (Marseille), the Max-Planck-Institut fur Complexer Systeme in Dresden, the  Weizmann Institute of Sciences in Rehovot and the Department of Physics of the University of Potsdam.

Nicola Dimitri is Professor of Economics at the University of Siena (Italy), Visiting Professor at the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca (Italy) and Life Member of Clare Hall College (Cambridge-UK). He was formerly Deputy Rector of the University of Siena and Chair of the Economics Department. He has been Fulbright Student, Chevening Scholar, NATO-CNR and Fernand Braudel Fellow (EUI). He built up numerous years of academic and professional experience in Innovation Procurement, where he was initially involved because of his background in Microeconomics and Game Theory. A main experience in this area was as economic advisor of Consip, the Italian Procurement Central Purchasing entity. He has academic and professional experience in the economics of innovation, having served as economic advisor in an Innovation Park for Life Sciences in Siena, focused on incubating start-ups.

Professor Béla Bollobás FRS is the Jabie Hardin Chair of Excellence in Combinatorics at the University of Memphis, and a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Professor Bollobás is one of the world's leading mathematicians in combinatorics. He has a huge published output, which includes major contributions to many different branches of this very large area, such as random graphs, percolation, extremal graphs and set systems, isoperimetric inequalities. His main area of research is combinatorics, particularly in graph theory. The two areas that interest him most are extremal graph theory and random graph theory.

Antonio Scala PhD, is a theoretical physicist, he got a Master in Physics and Computer Science at the University of Napoli; thesis on Frustrated Percolation and Monte Carlo Dynamics (PRL). Research activity on Reaction-Diffusion systems (PRL), Complex Networks (PNAS) and Protein Folding (PRE, EPL). Teaching Quantum Mechanics, Experimental Physics, Introductory Physics. Ph.D. in Condensed Matter Physics, Boston University; thesis on Metastable Critical Points and Energy Landscapes (PRL, Nature). 

Gianmarco Bet is Senior Researcher at the University of Florence in the Probability group led by Luca Avena (formerly Francesca Nardi). In 2017 he obtained his PhD at Eindhoven University of Technology, under the supervision of Johan van Leeuwaarden and Remco van der Hofstad in the Stochastics group. His research in applied probability is mainly focused on the fields of complex networks and mathematical physics.

Federico Capannoli is PhD student at the Mathematical Institute, University of Leiden, the Netherlands. The main objective of his project is to study the evolution of the voter model on random graphs. Voter models and its variants are examples of interacting particle systems on graphs that model how consensus is formed. In the classical model voters (vertex set) can have one of two opinions and a vertex updates and copies the opinion from one of its neighbours. The object of interest is the time to reach consensus. The project aims to understand how the geometry of the graph plays a role in determining the consensus time, especially when the degree distributions have power law. Also, the project plans to understand some of the voter models which can influence the dynamics of the random graph. The evolution of such majority dynamics is much more intricate as the geometry of the underlying graph may change completely.

Victor Saito is Assistant Professor at Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil. His long-term research goal is to understand the processes organizing the astonishing biodiversity of freshwater ecosystems, from the scale of riffles in small Atlantic Forest streams to the huge La Plata river basin. You will find him working at the Environmental Sciences Department at the Federal University of São Carlos, where he is an assistant professor trying to answer basic and applied questions about local (environmental filters, species interactions) and regional processes (dispersal, species pool characteristics) influencing the assembly and maintenance of ecological communities (e.g. species coexistence, functional and phylogenetic patterns). His previous research encompassed topics in numerical ecology, community ecology, limnology, biogeography and biomonitoring. In general, he likes to tackle his questions with a diverse toolbox and so, he conducts observational studies with aquatic communities and ecosystems, as well as computational simulations, modelling and mesocosm experimentation.

Iman van Lelyveld heads the Data Science Hub at the Dutch Central Bank and is Professor of Banking and Financial Markets at the Finance Group of the VU Amsterdam. He has been involved in many regulatory policy issues covering amongst others, interest rate risk in the banking book, deposit guarantee pricing, and CVA charges and the BCBS Research Task Force – chairing several groups. He has published widely on international banking and financial networks and has worked for Deutsche Bank, the Bank of England, and the International Data Hub at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). At the BIS he helped to setup analysis of the exposure network of the largest banks in the world.

Giulio Virginio Clemente holds a Bachelor's degree in Physics from the University of Salerno and a Master's degree in Physics of Complex Systems from the University of Turin. In 2024, he earned a PhD in System Science at IMT Lucca, where his research, supervised by Diego Garlaschelli, focused on developing and applying maximum entropy models for Markovian temporal networks. As part of his PhD, he spent time at University College Dublin under the supervision of Tancredi Caruso, working on the relationship between diversity and stability in ecological systems, with an emphasis on energy dynamics in food webs. He pursued postdoctoral research at the City College of New York under Hernán Makse, studying the impact of influential individuals on social networks. Currently, he works for the Joint Research Centre in Ispra under the supervision of Giovanni Strona, to investigate the drivers and mechanisms of mass extinction in the Anthropocene.

Subodh Patil is Assistant Professor at the Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics at Leiden University. His research primarily focuses on everything to do with early universe cosmology and related aspects of particle physics phenomenology. He is also interested in how models of reality nest together with seamless consistency, both intuitively and operationally. The primary toolkit for physicists to understand this is known as the renormalization group, and Subodh has been spending a lot of time recently thinking about real space renormalization techniques, especially applied to networks — the prototypical model abstraction of all relational systems.  

Rajat Subhra Hazra is Associate Professor at the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University. Previously, he held positions at the Indian Statistical Institute and the University of Zurich. He holds a PhD in Mathematics from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He is recipient of many prizes, including the 2020 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award in Mathematical Sciences (one of the highest multidisciplinary science awards in India given to scientists under the age of 45), the 2020 Young Statistical Scientist Award in the Theory and Methods category by the International Indian Statistical Association, the 2018 DST MATRICS grant by the Department of Science and Technology in India, the 2016 Young Scientist award in Mathematics by the Indian National Science Academy and the 2014 DST-INSPIRE Young Faculty Fellowship grant by the Department of Science and Technology in India. He is Elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences. His research interests include complex networks, random matrices, extreme value theory, free probability, and percolation. 

Kimberly Conteddu is a PhD student in data science at the Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Research Training in Foundations of Data Science (SFI - Data Science). Her interest lies in using novel statistical machine learning techniques and network analysis to understand the impact that human factors have on wildlife and biodiversity. She is involved in setting up a collaboration between the RU Networks of IMT and the Laboratory of Wildlife Ecology and Behaviour at University College Dublin, where she is currently supervised by Dr. Simone Ciuti. The collaboration will investigate the relationship between network structure, animal ecology and behaviour, and the risk of human-induced biodiversity loss.

Fabio Saracco has a Master's Degree in Theoretical Physics at the University of Florence, with a thesis on non-linear Cosmological perturbations. He obtained his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics (String Theory) at the University of Milano Bicocca in 2013, with a thesis on the resolution of strings singularities with A. Tomasiello (INFN, and Physics Dep., University of Milano Bicocca). In 2013 he moved to the Institute for Complex Systems (ISC-CNR, Sapienza Department, Rome), where he worked on Economic Complexity. In this period, Fabio developed an entropy-based method for network randomization for the special class of bipartite networks. Between October 2015 and May 2021, Fabio has been a senior researcher in the NETWORKS research unit at the IMT School in Lucca, working on evolving networks, non-linear algorithms and null models, with applications to online social networks, fake news, misinformation, ecological networks and trade networks.