| Giorgio Nicoletti

I am Giorgio Nicoletti, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Quantitative Life Sciences section of UNESCO’s International Center for Theoretical Pysics, a research center supported by the IAEA and the United Nations located in Trieste, Italy.

I am a theoretical physicist working at the interface between statistical physics, biology, and ecology. I obtained my PhD in Physics cum laude at the Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Physics of the University of Padova (Italy) under the supervision of Amos Maritan and Samir Suweis, with a particular focus on how the physics of phase transition and critical systems can be applied to the study of living systems. I then moved to the ECHO lab of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) for a postdoc with Andrea Rinaldo.

I was awarded the Graduate Alumni Award from the University of Padova for the best graduate student in the School of Science. I have been an affiliate of the Padova Neuroscience Center, in Italy, and a visiting PhD student at the AI center of the University of Tübingen, in Germany. I was a Visiting Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany. I have been a member of the Complex System Society, the Italian Society of Physics, the Italian Society of Statistical Physics, and the American Physical Society.

Research Highlights

Tuning transduction from hidden observables to optimize information harvesting

Giorgio Nicoletti and D. M. Busiello, Physical Review Letters 133, 158401 (2024) - Editors' Suggestion, Physics Viewpoint

How can we extract information on hidden signals via transduction mechanisms?

Information propagation in multilayer systems with higher-order interactions across timescales

Giorgio Nicoletti and D. M. Busiello, Physical Review X 14, 021007 (2024)

How do timescales shape the information content of complex multiscale systems?

Landscape and environmental heterogeneity support coexistence in competitive metacommunities

P. Padmanabha*, Giorgio Nicoletti*, D. Bernardi*, S. Suweis, S. Azaele, A. Rinaldo, A. Maritan, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121 (44), e2410932121 (2024)

How can competitive ecological communities survive in complex spatial landscapes?

Prenatal experience with language shapes the brain

B. Mariani, Giorgio Nicoletti, G. Barzon, M. C. Ortiz Barajas, M. Shukla, R. Guevara, S. Suweis, J. Gervain, Science Advances 9 (47) eadj3524 (2023)

How does the newborn brain respond to sounds from the maternal language?

News & Media Coverage

Excitation-Inhibition balance controls information encoding in neural populations

Phys.org featured article

Tuning transduction from hidden observables to optimize information harvesting

Physics magazine viewpoint by the American Physical Society
Phys.org featured article

Mutual information disentangles interactions from changing environments

Physics magazine viewpoint by the American Physical Society

Prenatal experience with language shapes the brain

Coverage by several international news outlets, such as The Times, El Pais, Daily Mail, Le Figaro, Haarez, Corriere della Sera, ANSA, and more
Coverage by several popular science publications, such as New Scientist, Nature Italy, Le Scienze, PsyPost, Science Alert, and more
Featuring in BBC's The Naked Scientists podcast
Press release by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

My Work at a Glance

My main research interest is the Statistical Physics of Complex Systems and its theoretical and multidisciplinary applications, from Neuroscience to Ecology. With Antonio Celani (ICTP, Italy), Daniel M. Busiello (MPIPKS, Germany) and many other collaborators, I am currently working on understanding how biological and artificial agents process information and make decisions in complex and stochastic environments. We are seeking universal principles that can be applied across different scales, from biochemical to neural networks, exploiting ideas from Information Theory and general tools from machine learning. With Amos Maritan (University of Padova), Andrea Rinaldo (EPFL) and Prajwal Padmanabha (University of Lausanne) I am also studying spatial metapopulation models through the lenses of Statistical Physics. By studying ecological systems in arbitrary network topologies, we seek to understand how dispersal affects survival, coexistence and dynamics of ecological metacommunities.

Collaboration network

This is my collaboration network: the color of each node specifies either a co-author, a preprint or journal article. Click on a node for more information.

Talks & contributions

The markers on the map represent a conference, workshop, or institute where I presented my work, either invited talks or contributed talks and posters. Click on a marker for more information.