Visiting Professors & Guest Scholars

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.

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.

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 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).

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.