I’m 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 at the University of Padova 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 at 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 hosted several times at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, as a visiting scientist. I have been a member of the Complex System Society, of the Italian Society of Physics, of the Italian Society of Statistical Physics, and the American Physical Society.

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 the 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

The network below represents my works and collaborations. 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 represents 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.