Profile:
My background is in theoretical physics. I earned my PhD in physics at the University of Padova (Italy) and then I moved to Princeton University (USA) as a research associate, before coming to the University of Leeds (UK). I finally joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Padova in 2019.

Research interests:
My research focuses on the mathematical modelling of biological systems, whether they be ecological communities or populations of cells. I have a deep interest in providing a quantitative explanation of general properties and patterns emerging from very different conditions and seemingly unrelated systems. To address such problems, I usually borrow ideas and techniques from statistical mechanics and stochastic processes.
Living systems are far from equilibrium: they diffuse across the real space, looking for resources to survive, and diffuse across the genomic space as well, looking for new solutions to ever-changing problems entailed by the struggle for life. This twofold and coupled diffusion process spawns an extraordinary variety of collective behaviours, brings about irreversible phenomena, develops self-organization and generates universal patterns. Distilling such a biological complexity to the primary driving mechanisms represents a formidable challenge and orients my research. I study such problems with a combination of tools borrowed from statistical mechanics, stochastic processes and non-linear dynamics.

Notices