Alessandro Vespignani is currently Sternberg Distinguished Professor at the Department of Physics, the College of Computer and Information Sciences and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences at Northeastern University in Boston, USA. He has obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” After holding research positions at Yale University and Leiden University, he has been a member of the condensed matter research group at the International Center for Theoretical Physics (UNESCO) in Trieste. Before joining Indiana University, Vespignani has been a faculty of the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique at the University of Paris-Sud working for the French National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS) of which he is still member at large. Vespignani is also Scientific Director of the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Torino, Italy. Recently Vespignani's research activity focuses on the interdisciplinary application of statistical and numerical simulation methods in the analysis of epidemic and spreading phenomena and the study of biological, social and technological networks. Vespignani is author, together with Pastor-Satorras, of the book Evolution and Structure of the Internet, published by Cambridge University Press. He was among the five scientists nominated for the Wired Magazine Rave Award in science for 2004.
Alain Barrat obtained his PhD in theoretical physics at the university of Paris VI (France) in 1996. He then spent two years at the Abdus Salam ICTP in Trieste, Italy, as a postdoctoral fellow. In 1998, he entered the National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS) of France with a permanent position as junior researcher. He spent 10 years as a CNRS researcher at the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique at the University of Paris-Sud. He is currently CNRS senior researcher at the Centre de Physique Théorique in Marseille, France. He is also research scientist at the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy. His research interests are in the field of disordered systems and out of equilibrium statistical mechanics. In the last years, his activity has focused on the study of complex networks and of the attached dynamical processes. His research has interdisciplinary applications such as the analysis of technological networks (Internet, transportation networks), the understanding of consensus formation in social networks or the study of epidemic spreading phenomena.
Vittoria Colizza completed her undergraduate studies in Physics at the University of Rome, IT, “La Sapienza” in Oct 2001 with a thesis on the thermodynamics of dense granular media. Starting in Nov of the same year, she entered the PhD program in Statistical and Biological Physics at the International School for Advanced Studies (ISAS), Trieste, IT, where she graduated in Oct 2004 with a thesis titled “Statistical mechanics approach to complex networks: from abstract to biological networks”. Right after she joined the Complex Systems Group at the Indiana University School of Informatics in Bloomington, IN, where she spent two years as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. In Feb 2006 she became a member of the Complex Networks Lagrange Laboratory (CNLL) at the Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI) in Turin, IT, and spent the year 2007 as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the IU School of Informatics. Colizza currently holds a position as a Researcher at the U707 at INSERM in Paris, France, and is also Research Leader at the Computational Epidemiology Laboratory in the ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy. Her research activity ranges from the analysis of the structural properties of complex networks and their relation to the networks’ functions, to the study of dynamical processes occurring on complex networks. In particular her interests focus on the characterization and modeling of the geographical spread of emerging infectious diseases.
Ciro Cattuto is the Deputy Scientific Director of the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Torino. He received his PhD in Physics from the University of Perugia (Italy). He subsequently worked at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (USA) and at the Frontier Research System of the RIKEN Institute (Japan) as a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). After that he worked at the Sapienza University of Roma with a grant from the Enrico Fermi Center (Roma). There, he contributed to the creation of the TAGora project (http://www.tagora-project.eu/). He moved to the ISI foundation at the beginning of 2008. His current research focuses on modeling complex phenomena in online information systems, and in general on using the concepts of statistical physics to study structural aspects and activity patterns of technological and social systems.
Fabio Ciulla is a PhD student in Physics at Northeastern University. He obtained his Master of Science with Summa Cum Laude grade in Physics at University of Rome "La Sapienza". He worked during his Master in the field of Physics of Liquids in the group of Francesco Sciortino, performing computer simulation of fluid systems. The joint work with the experimental group of Professor David Weitz at Harvard University resulted in an article published in Nature that received more than 100 citations. His current work focuses on Scientometry and Networks properties.
Laetitia Gauvin completed her master at Imperial College, London and at the Centre de Physique Théorique, Marseille. She then pursued a PhD (defended in October 2010) on the study of socio-economic systems using tools from statistical physics at the Laboratoire de Physique Statistique (LPS) of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. As a postdoctoral researcher, she has then been involved in the project Dyxi dealing with Urban Collective Dynamics: Individual and Spatial Heterogeneities. In this context, she also worked in collaboration with the laboratory ERMES (Team working on the Research on Markets, Employment and Simulation) at University Panthéon-Assas, Paris. She is now a postdoctoral researcher at the ISI Foundation in Turin and works on the SocioPatterns project. Her research interests focus on the study of socio-economic systems with an approach involving data mining, statistical physics analysis and numerical simulations.
Marcelo Gomes was born in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. He did his BSc. in physics at Instituto de Física, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (www.if.ufrgs.br) and his PhD in physics at the same Institution, under the advise of Dr. Sebastián Gonçalves (http://www.if.ufrgs.br/~sebas/).His thesis was entitled "Dinâmica de epidemias: efeitos do atraso e das interações entre agentes" (Epidemic dynamics: effects of delays and agents interactions). During my PhD, he had the opportunity to collaborate with Dr. V. M. Kenkre, during a two months visit to the Consortium of the Americas for Interdisciplinary Science (Albuquerque, NM, USA) and Dr. Marcelo Kuperman and Dr. Guillermo Abramson from the Centro Atómico Bariloche (San Carlos de Bariloche, Río Negro, Argentina). He was substitute Professor at the Physics Department of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in 2011. His research interests focuses on population dynamics, epidemic modeling, complex networks and agent mobility modeling with focus on the effects of different characteristic times distributions on the temporal evolution of spread, epidemic threshold and stability of the endemic state.
Bruno Gonçalves completed his joint PhD in Physics, MSc in C.S. at Emory
University in Atlanta, GA in 2008 following which he joined the Center
for Complex Networks and Systems Research at Indiana University as a
post-doctoral research associate. From September 2011 to August 2012 he has been an
Associate Research Scientist at the Laboratory for the Modeling of
Biological and Technical Systems at Northeastern University. Since September 2012 he is Assistant professor at Aix-Marseille University and performs his research activity within the Centre de Physique Théorique in Marseilles, France.
His
research activity focuses on using computational, visualization and data
analysis methods for the study of Complex Systems in a
multidisciplinary context. Current projects include detailed epidemic
modeling in structured populations; knowledge diffusion on large
technological networks; and the study of human behavior through the
analysis of proxy social network dynamics
Delia Mocanu is currently PhD student at Northeastern university.
Daniela Paolotti completed her undergraduate studies at the Department of Physics of the University of Perugia (Italy) in February 2001, with a thesis on "Transport phenomena in granular media". After that she received a scholarship at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (USA). In 2005 she received her PhD in Physics from the University of Camerino (Italy) with a thesis on "Driven Granular Media: a Numerical Approach". Right after she was hired in the Computational and Modeling Unit at the Casaccia Research Center of ENEA (Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment). At the same time she began working on the ENEA Grid Project at the ENEA Frascati Research Center. In 2006 she joined the Bioinformatics unit of the Novartis V&D Research Center in Siena (Italy), as a biostatistician in the MenB project. Since November 2007 she has been working as a Research Scientist at the Complex Networks Lagrange Laboratory (CNLL) of the ISI Foundation (Torino, Italy). Her research focuses on the simulation and modeling of the spreading of infectious diseases, and on the developement of Internet-based monitoring systems.
André Panisson is a Researcher at the Data Science Laboratory of the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy. He received his PhD in Computer science from the University of Turin (Italy) in February 2012. His PhD thesis, entitled "Selective Information Dissemination for Mobile Computing," was focused on how information can be effectively disseminated within communities of interest in the scope of mobile computing. He received his MSc in Computer Science from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) in 2007. His current research focuses on development of tools to facilitate the analysis, modeling, simulation and measurement of complex phenomena in systems that involve technological and social factors, using the concepts of complex networks to investigate activity patterns, communication and emergent properties.
Ana Pastore y Piontti obtained her "Licencitura" in Physics in 2007 from the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Argentina. Then, she continued her work in the same place, obtaining her PhD in December 2011. Her PhD thesis was entitled "Dynamical processes in complex networks", and she focused on the study of synchronization and congestion problems in complex networks. In January 2012 she joined Northeastern University to work in the lab of Prof. Vespignani as a post-doctoral researcher focusing her research on complex networks and the modeling of social systems and epidemics.
Nicola Perra carried out his undergraduate studies at the Department of Physics of the University of Cagliari (Italy), where he got his bachelor degree on September 23th, 2005, with the mark of 110/110 cum laude, presenting the thesis "Elastic diffusion: Born, Iconale and partial waves approximations ". He got his master degree on Octber 23th , 2007 with the mark of 110/110 cum laude, presenting the thesis "Diffusion processes and centrality measures in Complex Networks ". In January 2008 he began his PhD studies at the Department of Physics of the University of Cagliari in the field of Complex Networks Science and Statistical Mechanics. He got his Ph.D. on January 11th, 2011 presenting the thesis "Reaction-Diffusion processes on complex networks". During the period between 3/08 and 11/08 he worked with COSMOLAB in the Research project "Community Detection in Infrastructural Networks". From November 2008 till July 2009 he was Visiting Scholar at the Complex Networks group of the Indiana university in Bloomington, IN, USA. From July 2009 till August 2011 he was Research Associate at the Center for Complex Networks Systems Research of the Indiana university in Bloomington, IN, USA. Since September 2011 he is Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Northeastern University in Boston, MA, USA. His research activity focuses on mathematical and computational modeling of dynamical processes on Complex Networks, human behavior and human dynamics. In particular he is involved in the study of centrality measures in large networks, detailed epidemic modeling in structure populations, behavioral changes in populations due to the spreading of infectious diseases, diffusion processes in static and dynamical networks, theoretical aspects of the modeling of infectious diseases in networks and graph theory.
Chiara Polettocompleted her undergraduate studies in Physics at the University of Padova, IT, in March 2005 with a thesis on a statistical mechanics model of biopolymers, and she continued working on this project with a grant from the University until the end of the year. In January 2006 she started her PhD studies at the University of Padova, that she concluded in December 2008 with a thesis titled "Solvent induced interactions in biopolymers: origin of secondary motifs", focusing on the theoretical study of solvent-protein interactions within a coarse grained description of biopolymers. She then joined the Computational Epidemiology Lab at the ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy. She is now postdoc in the U707 Unit of the Inserm in Paris. Her research interests focus on the characterization and modeling of epidemic spreading processes.
Luca Rossi obtained his Master degree in Physics from the University of Bologna, Italy, in October 2002, and completed the joint supervision of a doctoral thesis between the University of Bologna and the University of Sud Toulon-Var, France, receiving his PhD in Physics in July 2006. After performing postdoctoral research at the University of Bologna concerning the development of numerical models for the simulation of the dynamics of systems characterized by long-range interactions, he joined in April 2007 the Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI) in Zaragoza, Spain, as a postdoctoral research associate, working in collaboration with the National Fusion Laboratory (CIEMAT) of Madrid. His research was mainly devoted to the computational modeling of plasma physics phenomena relevant to the neutral beam injectors proposed for the ITER international project. Before joining Northeastern University in September 2011, he worked since January 2011 at the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Torino, Italy. His current research activity focuses on the mathematical and computational modeling of the spreading of epidemics at the worldwide scale, based on a structured metapopulation approach.
Qian Zhang is currently a PhD student in College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University, Boston, MA. She received Bachelor degrees in Computer Science Technology and English from Taiyuan University of Technology, Shanxi, China in July 2004. From 2004 to 2006, she was a PhD student in School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University (BUAA), Beijing, China, and worked on pattern recognition, robotics and computer vision. In January 2007 she moved to Canada to start research on public health modeling in Software Research Lab in Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, where she received my Master of Science in Computer Science in December 2008 with the thesis “Application and Evaluation of Local and Global Analysis for Dynamic Models of Infectious Disease Spread”. After that she joined School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University as a PhD student in January 2009. In September 2011, she moved to Northeastern University to continue her PhD program with Prof. Vespignani, focusing on research projects of complex networks and modeling of social systems and epidemics.