MSCA PF Fellow: Riccardo Michielan

Riccardo Michielan is an MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Padua. He obtained his PhD at the University of Twente (Netherlands), where he studied how hidden geometry and degree heterogeneity shape the structure of large networks, from local motifs (like triangles and cliques) to broader connectivity patterns.

He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI), in the Computer Science group, where he works on algorithmic methods for temporal random graphs.

His research interests sit at the intersection of probability theory, random graphs, and network science. In particular, his main contributions consist of developing mathematical tools to determine when specific patterns in real networks are "typical" and when they are genuinely surprising. A recurring theme is the role of hubs in scale-free networks: a small number of highly connected nodes can dominate clustering, make rare substructures much more likely, and bias the statistics that are commonly used to detect communities or geometry.

In the MSCA project PAiNe, Riccardo, together with Prof. Alessandra Bianchi, focuses on building a principled probabilistic framework for network patterns and anomalies: quantifying the likelihood of malicious agents acting in a network, revealing the most likely mechanisms to model and reproduce them. The results will provide a rigorous baseline for distinguishing planted anomalies from natural fluctuations, with applications across a wide range of networked systems, from technology and infrastructure to biology and the social sciences.