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Visiting Professors
Visiting Professors
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.
Tancredi Caruso is Associate Professor of Ecology at University College Dublin. His research focuses on the processes that structure soil biodiversity in space and time and he has mostly worked on aboveground-belowground linkages, especially plants and soil biota, and the ecological networks they form, and how ecological networks respond to environmental change and perturbations. One current research focus is the quantification of structures in fluctuating, large networks established between bacteria, fungi and plants, as well as the soil food web, and changes in those structures following extreme events with the ultimate goal of linking changes in network structure to the changes in the functions delivered by the network.
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.
Luca Avena received a M.Sc. in mathematics (cum laude) in 2006 from the University of Rome ROMATRE, after preparing a thesis under the supervision of Prof. F. Martinelli and Prof. P. Caputo. During his bachelor studies, he spent one year at the mathematics department in Granada (Spain). After completion of his master studies, Luca started a PhD programme at Leiden University (The Netherlands) under the supervision of Prof. F. den Hollander. In 2010 he defended his PhD thesis. After few years as post-doc at the University of Zürich (Switzerland) in the group of Prof. E. Bolthausen and at the WIAS institute of Berlin (Germany) in the group of Prof. W. König, since June 2014 he has been employed first as assistant professor and since 2020 as associate professor in Probability Theory at Leiden University. His main research activities focus on a number of topics in probability theory and statistical physics, e.g. random motion in random media, expansion methods and random graphs.
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.
Hernán Makse currently serves as Professor of Physics at City College of New York, wherein he is responsible for the Complex Networks and Soft Matter lab at the Levich Institute. He is also a Member Affiliate, Attending Imaging Scientist, MSKCC Rank at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He holds a PhD degree in Physics from Boston University. He has been author of numerous publications on the theory of complex systems and the physics of soft materials and he is an APS Fellow. His research focuses on the theoretical understanding of Complex Systems from a Statistical Physics viewpoint. He is working towards the development of new emergent laws for complex systems, ranging from brain networks to biological networks and social systems. Treating these complex systems from a unified theoretical approach, he uses concepts from statistical mechanics, network and optimization theory, artificial intelligence, and big-data science to advance new views on complex systems and networks.
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.
Professor Andrea Gabrielli is Associate Professor at the University of Rome ROMATRE. In recent years he collaborated to the development of the theory of Economic Complexity and studied the problem of reconstruction of complex networks from partial information which is of capital importance mainly in finance. He has a solid expertise in statistical physics of complex systems, stochastic processes and complex network theory. He is currently a researcher at CNR, a Visiting Professor at IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, and at the Physics Department of the Boston University (MA, USA). He is author of more than 100 scientific publications on peer reviewed international journals and of one scientific book of statistical physics published by Springer (2004).
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).
Guest Scholars
Guest Scholars
Pablo Villegas is a Full Researcher at the Enrico Fermi Research Center (CREF) in Rome. He works at the interface of statistical mechanics, complex networks, and theoretical neuroscience. His research focuses on critical phenomena and emergent collective behavior in heterogeneous systems, from biological to theoretical. He has led essential advances in applying renormalization group techniques to complex structures, opening new directions in the multiscale modeling of complex networks. His work explores broadband criticality, mesoscopic modeling of living matter, and the interplay between structure and dynamics in non-equilibrium and disordered systems. He is currently developing theoretical frameworks to control frustrated architectures and to uncover the physical principles of universality behind functional complexity.
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.
Vito D. P. Servedio is a senior researcher at the Complexity Science Hub, specializing in the multifaceted aspects of human dynamics. His work spans both conceptual and practical domains, including innovation dynamics, opinion dynamics, economic complexity, and railway systems analysis. With a background in physics, Vito has developed a strong expertise in ab initio calculations for determining electronic properties of materials, as well as agent-based modeling applied to social and technological systems. Vito’s curiosity-driven research leads him to apply complex systems analysis tools to a wide range of subjects, including chess, blockchain technology, and music analysis. This diverse application of his skills makes him a truly interdisciplinary scientist. Among his key achievements, Vito led the Kouzan group at CSH, collaborating with SONY-CSL to secure a US patent for a blockchain-based device recording information flow in working groups. He also developed a macroscopic railway simulation to study delay dynamics in the Austrian railway system.
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.
Andrea Luppi is a Wellcome Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. HIs work investigates how brain function arises from the complex interplay of brain structure and dynamics. To this end, he studies how pharmacological and pathological perturbations such as coma, anaesthesia and psychedelics reshape brain function across species (human, macaque, mouse) and across modalities. Working at the intersection of integrative and computational neuroscience, he combines approaches from information theory, network science and whole-brain computational modelling.
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.
Michel Mandjes studied Econometrics and Mathematics at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam. After he obtained his PhD in Operations Research at the VU and worked outside of academia for some years. In 2000, Michel returned as full professor of Stochastic Operations Research at Twente University and as group leader at the Centre Mathematics & Computer Science (CWI). In 2004, he joined the mathematics department of the University of Amsterdam. He has taken sabbaticals at Stanford University (2008) and New York University (2013-2014). Since October 2023 Michel works at the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University as full professor of Probability and Operations Research.
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.
Eric Cator is Full Professor in Applied Stochastics, Radboud University, Nijmegen and director of IMAPP (the Institute for Mathematics, Astrophysics and Particle Physics) since September 2020. Before that, he was the head of the mathematics department. He has a long experience in teaching, developing many new courses and writing several lecture notes. In Nijmegen he is responsible for all teaching in Statistics and a large part of Probability. He has also nurtured contacts in industry, governmental agencies and research groups outside of mathematics. Next to his mathematical research in probability, statistics and some in functional analysis, potential theory and foundations of physics, he has been very actively involved in interdisciplinary research. Also, next to his publications in several fields of science, he has given statistical advice to many companies and organizations, among which are Shell, the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and an insurance advice firm. In recent years he has been involved in ministerial advisory committees on seismic risks, in Groningen and other parts of the Netherlands. He believes a scientist’s place is not in an ivory tower.
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.
Nicola Pedreschi obtained a Master's Degree in Theoretical Physics at the University of Pisa in 2018. He obtained his PhD in Statistical Physics and Complex Systems at the University of Aix-Marseille in 2021, working on dynamic networks and their applications to functional neuro-imaging data with Alain Barrat and Demian Battaglia. In 2022 he moved to the Network Science group lead by Renaud Lambiotte, at the University of Oxford, where he continued working on dynamic networks, both from a theoretical point of view, as well as with applications in various fields ranging from social and urban systems to networks of hippocampal neurons in mice. In September 2024 he joined the group of Giulio Pergola at the Department of Translational Medicine and Neuroscience of the University of Bari, where he works on developing new tools and methods to analyse gene coexpression networks.
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.
François Lafond is Deputy Director of the Complexity Economics Programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He is also Lead Researcher at the Smith School for Enterprise and the Environment, an Oxford Martin School fellow, and an Associate Member of Nuffield college. François’s current research interests lie in the macroeconomics of the net zero transition, the structure and evolution of production networks, and the future of technology. His research attempts to address important economic questions by marrying complex systems methods with domain knowledge in economics. His research has appeared in economics and interdisciplinary journals, and has been featured in books, news articles, and public sector reports.
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.
Fernando A Nóbrega Santos is a Research Fellow a the Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena (DIEP) and at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). He is also a visiting fellow at the Department of Anatomy and Neurosciences at VUmc in Amsterdam. Before that, he was Research Associate at the Multiscale division of the Department of Anatomy and Neurosciences of the Amsterdam University Medical Center and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Mathematics of the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil. He has also held visiting fellowships at the Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology, Oxford University, the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste and the Jean Lamour Institute, Lorraine University. His research integrates theoretical physics, applied mathematics and data science, focusing on bridging results in computational topology, geometry and statistical mechanics with network neuroscience and artificial intelligence. His current research focuses on bridging brain imaging and behavior.
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.
Pierfrancesco Dionigi received his bachelor’s degree in Physics and his master degree in Theoretical Physics from University of Bologna, Italy. His master thesis, entitled “A Random Matrix approach to Complex Networks”, concerned the analysis of random graphs using Random Matrix Theory and studying the Empirical Spectral Distribution of the main matrix quantities related to networks. Pierfrancesco started his PhD in Leiden in October 2019 under the supervision of Frank den Hollander and Diego Garlaschelli under the project “Breaking of ensemble equivalence for complex networks”. The project goal is to analyze the breaking of ensemble equivalence in complex networks sheding new light on possible relations with their spectral distribution.
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.
Giovanni Petri is a Senior Research Scientist at the ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy. He is an expert in the theoretical and empirical analysis of complex systems, with an emphasis on the structural and temporal properties of networks with higher-order interactions and feedback dynamics. He has broadened his research to include the investigation of whole-brain activation patterns and the structure of task representation in cognitive systems, with particular reference to their topological structure, merging statistical physics approach, algebraic topology and data analysis. He is currently focusing on dynamical connectivity during resting state and tasks, aiming to build robust quantitative tools to be used as building blocks to develop biomarkers and as guiding principles to reverse-engineer functional connectivity dynamics.
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