Amos Maritan awarded the EPS Statistical and Nonlinear Physics Prize

13.10.2023

The 2023 EPS Statistical and Nonlinear Physics Prize has been awarded to Amos Maritan of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Padua and to Amnon Aharony of Tel Aviv University.

Every two years, the award is given to scientists based on their exceptional and original contributions to research in the areas of statistical physics, nonlinear physics, complex systems and complex networks.

Professor Amos Maritan is honored "for his seminal contributions in the understanding of the physical principles underlying collective behavior in biological systems, including protein folding, DNA organization, ecosystems, and river networks."

During his long scientific career, Prof Maritan has produced and published hundreds of scientific works in some of the world’s most important international journals. His results have opened up and developed original, innovative and fruitful lines of research in many areas of statistical and interdisciplinary physics.  Testing the phenomenological renormalization group method, to the equations for the stochastic growth of surfaces, many of his works also include allometry-based scaling approaches for understanding forest structure, up to the most recent research on the stability of large ecosystems.

Born in Padua, Amos Maritan graduated with a degree in Physics at the University of Padua in 1979 and obtained his Ph.D. in Physics at the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste in 1983. He was appointed as associate professor at the University of Bari from 1991 to 1994 and became full professor at SISSA from 1995 to 2003. Prof Maritan returned to the University of Padua in 2003, where he also contributed as the Dean of the “Scuola Galileiana” School of Excellence.