Alessandro Vespignani

Biography

Alessandro Vespignani is the Sternberg Family Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University with joint appointments between the College of Science, the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences. He is the executive director of the Network Science Institute.

Vespignani’s research activity is focused on the study of “techno-social” systems, where infrastructures composed of different technological layers are interoperating within the social component that drives their use and development. In this context we aim at understanding how the very same elements assembled in large number can give rise—according to the various forces and elements at play—to different macroscopic and dynamical behaviors, opening the path to quantitative computational approaches and forecasting power.

The main research lines pursued at the moment are:

• Develop analytical and computational models for the co-evolution and interdependence of large-scale social, technological and biological networks.
• Modeling contagion processes in structured populations.
• Developing predictive computational tools for the analysis of the spatial spread of emerging diseases.
• Analyze the dynamics and evolution of information and social networks.
• Model the adaptive behavior of social systems.

Vespignani received his undergraduate degree and PhD , both in physics, from the University of Rome – La Sapienza.