Faculty Members

Alessandro Vespignani
Sternberg Family Distinguished University Professor
PhD University of Rome, 1994

a.vespignani@neu.edu
Personal Home Page

Professor Vespignani's research focuses on the study of “techno-social” systems, in which infrastructures composed of different technological layers are interoperating within the social component that drives their use and development. In this context, he aims to understand how large numbers of identical elements can give rise to different macroscopic and dynamical behaviors, opening the path to quantitative computational approaches and forecasting power.

Currently Professor Vespignani's primary research involves:

• Developing 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
• Analyzing the dynamics and evolution of information and social networks
• Modeling the adaptive behavior of social systems