Alessandro Vespignani is an Italian-American physicist, best known for his work on complex networks, and particularly for work on the applications of network theory to the spread of disease, applications of computational epidemiology, and for studies of the topological properties of the Internet. He is currently the Sternberg Family Distinguished University Professor of Physics, Computer Science and Health Sciences at Northeastern University, where he is the director of the Network Science Institute. Vespignani is serving in the board/leadership of a variety of professional associations, institutions and journals. Vespignani is author, together with Romualdo Pastor-Satorras, of the book Evolution and Structure of the Internet. Together with Alain Barrat and Marc Barthelemy he has published in 2008 the monograph Dynamical Processes on Complex Networks.
Career and research
Vespignani received his undergraduate degree and Ph.D., both in physics and both from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, in 1990 and 1993, respectively. Following postdoctoral research at Yale University and Leiden University, he worked at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste for five years, and briefly at the University of Paris-Sud, before moving to Indiana University in 2004, and then to Northeastern University in 2011. Vespignani has worked in a number of areas of physics, including characterization of non-equilibrium phenomena and phase transitions, computer science, network science and computational epidemiology. He has collaborated with, among others, Luciano Pietronero, Benoit Mandelbrot, Betz Halloran, Ira Longini, and David Lazer. He describes his current research as being focused on "interdisciplinary application of statistical and numerical simulation methods in the analysis of epidemic and spreading phenomena and the study of biological, social and technological networks." He is best known, however, for his work on complex networks. Of particular note is his work with Romualdo Pastor-Satorras, in which the two demonstrated that for a disease propagating on a random scale-free network the transmission probability or infectivity necessary to sustain an outbreak tends to zero in the limit of large network size. Vespignani has worked also on modeling the spatial spread of epidemics, including the realistic and data-driven modeling of emerging infectious diseases, and contributed to advance computational epidemiology by developing specific tools for the analysis of the global spread of epidemics.
Honors
Vespignani is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Network Science Society. He has been inducted in the Academia Europaea in 2011. In 2016 he has received the Aspen Institute Italia Award for scientific research and collaboration between Italy and the United States for the research on the “Spatiotemporal spread of the 2014 outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Liberia and the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical intervention: a computational modelling analysis.” In 2017 Vespignani received the Doctorate Honoris Causa from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. In 2018 he received the John Graunt award for extraordinary achievements in one of the population sciences, and the Senior Scientific award of the Complex Systems Society for outstanding contributions to Complex Systems & Network sciences.
