Career and Research
Alessandro 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 Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste for five years, and briefly at the University of Paris-Sud, before moving to Indiana University in 2004. Vespignani has worked in a number of areas of physics, including characterization of non-equilibrium phenomena and phase transitions, and collaborated with, among others, Luciano Pietronero and Benoit Mandelbrot. He is best known, however, for his work on complex networks. 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."
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. In practice this means that such a disease will never die out, no matter what steps are taken to reduce the probability of its transmission between individuals.
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