I obtained a degree in Physics from the University of Genoa in 1990; in 1994 I was then awarded a PhD in Material Sciences from the Politecnico di Milano (second year at Imperial College, London). After two Post-Docs at the University of Strasbourg (’94-‘98) and at the University of Genoa (’98-‘01), in 2002 I obtained a permanent position in the Department of Applied Mathematics, at The Australian National University (Canberra, Australia), where in 2006, I was promoted Associate Professor. In 2009 I moved to UK taking a position as Reader at The School of Physics at The University of Kent in Canterbury UK. I am now Reader at the Department of Computer Science UCL.

My first studies concerned strongly correlated electron systems with applications to superconductivity and magnetism. Then, I turned my interest towards the spontaneous emergence of organized patterns during material processing. These studies lead me to investigate cellular structures, packings and foams discovering that some of the emerging structural properties are the consequence of simple geometrical and topological constraints and they are therefore universal and independent from the specific system. I then had the idea to apply the same reasoning to complex structures in high dimensions uncovering rules that turned out to be relevant to the extraction of information from complex datasets. My methods are now successfully applied to the study of financial data, gene expression data and brain activity data.