Lecturers
Albert-László Barabási - Northeastern University, Boston (USA)
Albert-László Barabási is the Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University, where he directs the Center for Complex Network Research, and holds appointments in the Departments of Physics and College of Computer and Information Science, as well as in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women Hospital in the Channing Division of Network Science, and is a member of the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute. A Hungarian born native of Transylvania, Romania, he received his Masters in Theoretical Physics at the Eötvös University in Budapest, Hungary and was awarded a Ph.D. three years later at Boston University. Barabási's latest book is the popular textbook "Network Science" (Cambridge University Press, 2016). He has also authored "Linked: The New Science of Networks" (Perseus, 2002), currently available in fifteen languages, "Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do" (Dutton, 2010) available in five languages, and is the co-editor of "The Structure and Dynamics of Networks" (Princeton, 2005). His work lead to the discovery of scale-free networks in 1999, and proposed the Barabási-Albert model to explain their widespread emergence in natural, technological and social systems, from the cellular telephone to the WWW or online communities.
Alain Barrat - Centre de Physique Théorique, Marseille (France)
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 - INSERM & UPMC, Paris (France)
Dr. Vittoria Colizza is Director of Research at Inserm (French National Institute of Health and Medical Research) & Sorbonne Universite, Faculte de Medecine, Paris, France. With a PhD in Statistical and Biological Physics from the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, in 2004, she spent 3 years in the US at Indiana University (Bloomington, IN), first as a post-doc and then as a Visiting Assistant Professor. In 2007 she moved back to Europe and joined ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy, after being awarded a Starting Independent Career Grant in Life Sciences by the European Research Council. In 2011 Colizza joined Inserm in Paris where she leads the EPIcx lab (Epidemics in complex environments, www.epicx-lab.com) within the Pierre Louis Institute of Epidemiology and Public Health. Her work focuses on real episodes of human and animal epidemics (e.g. 2009 H1N1 pandemic influenza, MERS-CoV epidemic, Ebola virus disease epidemic, rabies, bovine brucellosis) to gather context epidemic awareness and provide risk assessment analyses for preparedness, mitigation, and control. Her research also includes more theoretical approaches for the modeling of small- to large-scale diffusion events where contacts between hosts and their mobility are explicitly considered from data (face-to-face interactions, contact matrices, commuting, air travel, migrations, trade movements, call detail records, etc.).Colizza received several awards, including the Young Talent Award by the Italian Ministry of Youth in 2010, the Prix Louis-Daniel Beauperthuy 2012 by the French Academy of Sciences, the Young Scientist Award for Socio-Econophysics in 2013, the Telethon Farmindustria Award in 2017, the Erdős–Rényi Prize by the Network Science Society in 2017. She also served as Young Advisor to the Vice President of the European Commission Mrs. Neelie Kroes for the Digital Agenda for Europe, and was member of the I7 Innovators’ Strategic Advisory Board on People-Centered Innovation for Italy for G7 in 2017.
Shlomo Havlin - Bar-Ilan University (Israel)
Professor Shlomo Havlin is internationally recognized as one of the world’s top statistical physicists. His exceptional achievements in Statistical Physics and its applications to interdisciplinary science have opened new avenues of research with far-reaching productive consequences.
Professor Havlin pioneered our understanding of anomalous transport in turbid media, which has led to extensive basic research and to applications ranging from diffusion in materials and oil recovery to biomedical diagnosis. He led the way in applying Statistical Physics to biological and climate systems, and co-discovered long-range correlations in nature, as in DNA sequences, in physiological time series such as heartbeats, and in climate fluctuations. The method of detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) that he pioneered is currently the standard approach. It has been applied to hundreds of studies in fields ranging from Biology, Medicine and Physiology to Climatology, Seismology and Economics. He has recently made fundamental contributions to understand the problem of multilayer networks with applications to social infrastructures and systemic risk.
János Kertész - Central European University, Budapest (Hungary)
János Kertész got his PhD from Eötvös University. He is professor at the Central European University (CEU) and head of the Department of Network and Data Science at (DNDS) as well as part time professor of physics at the Budapest University of Technology. DNDS at CEU hosts the first PhD Program on Network Science in Europe. Janos has been visiting scientist in Germany, US and Finland. His main interest is interdisciplinary applications of statistical physics and computational social science. He is elected member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has been decorated by several recognitions including “Finland Distinguished Professorship” and “Szechenyi Prize” of the Hungarian State.
Fabrizio Lillo - Università di Bologna (Italy)
Fabrizio Lillo is Full Professor of Mathematical Methods for Economics and Finance at the University of Bologna (Italy). Formerly he has been Associate Professor of Mathematical Finance at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa (Italy). He has been also External Faculty and Professor (2009-2012) at the Santa Fe Institute (USA). He has been awarded the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics of the German Physical Society in 2007. He is author of more than 85 referred scientific papers. According to Google Scholar, his papers have received 5,400 citations and his h-index is 37. He is also member of the editorial board of 5 journals (including Journal of Statistical Mechanics (JSTAT) and Market Microstructure and Liquidity) and he is referee for 43 international journals and 9 national funding agencies. Besides other projects, he is responsible of one of the units of the H2020 project SoBigData. He has also been responsible of one of the units of the FP7 funded European project CRISIS (Complexity Research Initiative for Systemic InstabilitieS) and of an INET grant, both focused on financial systemic risk and of ELSA and ComplexWorld, two European projects on Air Traffic Management.
Rosario Nunzio Mantegna - Università di Palermo (Italy)
Rosario Nunzio Mantegna is professor of applied physics at Palermo University and honorary professor at University College London. Since 2017 he is also member of the External Faculty of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. He was postdoc at the MPI for Quantum Optics in Munich, and at Boston University. His research covers interdisciplinary applications of statistical physics. He is one of the pioneers in the fields of econophysics and economic networks. Rosario has been principal investigator or member of several international and national research projects.
Markus Strohmaier - HumTec Institute, RWTH Aachen University (Germany)
Markus Strohmaier is a Professor for Methods and Theories of Computational Social Sciences and Humanities at RWTH Aachen (Germany), and the Scientific Coordinator for Digital Behavioral Data at GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. Previously, he was a Post-Doc at the University of Toronto (Canada), an Assistant Professor at Graz University of Technology (Austria), a visiting scientist at (XEROX) Parc (USA), a Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University (USA) and the founder and scientific director of the department for Computational Social Science at GESIS (Germany). He is interested in applying and developing computational techniques to research challenges on the intersection between computer science and the social sciences / humanities.
Stefan Thurner - Medical University of Vienna (Austria)
Stefan Thurner is full professor for Science of Complex Systems at the Medical University of Vienna, where he chairs Section for Science of Complex Systems. Since 2007 he is external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, since 2010 he is a part-time senior researcher at IIASA. He is the President of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna.
Since 1995 Thurner has published more than 170 scientific articles in fundamental physics (topological excitations in quantum field theories, entropy for complex systems), applied mathematics (wavelet statistics, fractal harmonic analysis, anomalous diffusion), complex systems (network theory, evolutionary systems), life sciences (network medicine, gene regulatory networks, bioinformatics, heart beat dynamics, cell motility), economics (price formation, regulation, systemic risk) and lately in social sciences (opinion formation, buerocratic inefficiency, collective human behavior in virtual worlds). He holds 2 patents.