Statistical Physics and Interdisciplinary Applications

Specific mission

Statistical physics of disordered systems, computational neuroscience and computational biology, inverse dynamical problems, distributed algorithms for optimisation, constraint satisfaction problems and statistical inference, information theory, machine learning, protein folding, dynamics of cellular systems, modelling post-transcriptional regulation, optimization and control of dynamical processes on networks, non-equilibrium and fixation properties in structured populations, graphical games and socio-economic interactions, Statistical physics of cell signaling and cell membrane dynamics, Statistical methods for inference of structural properties of protein from co-evolutionary data, reconstruction of signaling pathways from multi-drugs perturbations. We refer to the web pages of the single researchers for details on the specific objectives.

Main research topics

  • Computational biology and computational neuroscience
  • Variational approaches in statistical mechanics
  • Spin glass theory
  • Statistical inference, optimization and distributed algorithms
  • Inverse Problems
  • Protein folding: contact prediction and dynamics
  • Out-of-equilibrium physics in graphical models and biological systems
  • Game Theory in Networks
  • Cell signaling
  • Cell membrane dynamics

Main partnerships

  • Italian Institute for Genomic Medicine: computational biology
  • Microsoft Research New England: algorithms for computational biology
  • Ecole Normale Supérieure: Statistical Physics in neuroscience
  • MIT Bio-engineering lab: inference of signalling pathways
  • Politecnico di Torino: Neural Engineering and Computation Lab
  • University of Chicago: computational neuroscience
  • Molecular Biology Center Turin: post-transcriptional regulation
  • SISSA, Trieste: stochastic population dynamics, non-equilibrium physics
  • BIFI Institute, Zaragoza: protein folding dynamics
  • University of Cambridge: protein folding dynamics 
  • Université Pierre et Marie Curie, CNRS: Inference and co-evolution
  •  Bocconi University: socio-economic networks
  •  Università di Torino: cell metabolism
  •  Universidad Nacional Autónoma del Mexico: medical image inference and processing
  •  Candiolo Cancer Institute: cell signaling, cell membrane dynamics
  •  Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, Chernogolovka, Russian Federation: cell membrane dynamics

Projects and publications