Alessandro Vespignani (born April 4, 1965) is an Italian-American physicist, best known for his work on
mathematical modeling of infectious 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,[1] where he is the director of the Network Science Institute
.
Vespignani and his team have contributed mathematical and computational modeling analysis on several disease outbreaks, including
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 “
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."[4]
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’s works on modeling the spatial spread of epidemics includes the realistic and data-driven modeling of emerging infectious diseases,[5] and contributions to computational epidemiology by developing specific tools for the analysis of the global spread of epidemics.[6][7]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Vespignani’s team investigated[8] how travel and quarantine influenced the dynamics of the spread of SARS-CoV-2.[9] The modeling analysis mapped the early dispersal of infections and the temporal windows of the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 and onset of local transmission in Europe and the USA,[10] showing that hidden outbreaks were spreading almost completely undetected in major US cities.[11] Vespignani research contributed also to covid forecasting[12][13] and scenario analysis.[14]
R. Pastor-Satorras; A. Vazquez & A. Vespignani (2001). "Dynamical and correlation properties of the Internet". Physical Review Letters. 87 (25): 258701.
Tizzoni, M., Bajardi, P., Poletto, C., Ramasco, J.J., Balcan, D., Goncalves, B., Perra, N., Colizza, V., Vespignani, A., Real-time numerical forecast of global epidemic spreading: case study of 2009 A/H1N1pdm. BMC Med 10, 165 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1186/1741-7015-10-165.
Piontti, A. P., Perra, N., Rossi, L., Samay, N., & Vespignani, A. (2019). Charting the next pandemic: modeling infectious disease spreading in the data science age. Heidelberg: Springer.
