Short bio
Curriculum Vitae
I was born in Genova (Italy) on January 16th 1980. I graduated from the University of Genova in 2004 with a master thesis on the role of turbulence for cloud microphysics. I then moved to Nice (France) for my PhD where I worked at the Institut non lineaire de Nice, under the supervision of Antonio Celani and Andrea Mazzino. I graduated in 2007 with a thesis on various aspects of turbulent transport; from the statistics of passive scalar fields transported by turbulent flows, to the fate of droplets condensing in a turbulent cloud, to the properties of rocky costs. In 2008 I moved to Boston to work in the group of Michael Brenner at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard on the physics of microbial systems. I obtained a Marie Curie international outgoing fellowship 2008-2010 (Harvard) and joined the group of Massimo Vergassola at Institut Pasteur in 2010-2011. In 2012 I went back to Harvard as an instructor of Applied Mathematics and in 2013 I started an independent position at CNRS and integrated the Institut de Physique de Nice. In 2021 I joined the University of Genoa to start my newly funded ERC project on physics informed algorithms for sensing and navigating turbulent environments.
I work on diverse problems at the interface of physics and biology, from the biomechanics of bacterial biofilm growth, to the violent discharge and atmospheric dispersal of fungal spores, to the computational principles that govern navigation in diverse organisms from mice and octopuses to sea robins and other marine organisms. The thread that connects all of these systems is their fluid environement. I am fascinated by the diversity of solutions organisms evolved to understand their fluid environment, even when turbulence makes it unpredictable and risky. How do we make decisions when information is noisy and unreliable?
