Featured FET Young Explorers
Vittoria Colizza
Research interests
Vittoria leads the Integrating methods of complex systems with statistical physics approaches, computational sciences, and geographic information systems. Vittoria's main research activities focus on the characterization and modeling of the spread of emerging infectious diseases. Current research explores the effect of travel on the worldwide propagation of human epidemics, strategies to control and mitigate pandemics, diffusion and security of cyber epidemics, and most recently the study of H1N1 pandemic to provide predictions in real time. Vittoria also works on the analysis of networks' organization in relation to their function and performance, in the fields of transportation, scientific collaboration, biology, social systems.
Background
Vittoria completed her undergraduate studies in Physics at the University of Rome "Sapienza", Italy, in Oct 2001 with a thesis titled Fluctuation-dissipation relations in dense granular media. She then entered the PhD program in Statistical and Biological Physics at the International School for Advanced Studies (ISAS/SISSA), Trieste, Italy, where she graduated in October 2004 with a thesis titled Statistical mechanics approach to complex networks: from abstract to biological networks. After holding a research position for two years at the Indiana UniversitySchool of Informatics in Bloomington, IN, Vittoria spent a year as Visiting Assistant Professor at Indiana University and joined the ISI Foundation in Turin in 2007.
Honors and awards
She was recently awarded a Starting Independent Career Grant in Life Sciences by the European Research Council Ideas Programme.