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Research interests
As an environmental engineer with a PhD in information technology, I am deeply interested in the analysis of ecological and environmental processes by means of quantitative tools. My research activity is mainly devoted to the study of spatiotemporal dynamics in ecology and epidemiology by means of simple (whenever possible) yet rigorous mechanistic models.
Research activities
Examples of problems I have recently analyzed – or I am still struggling with – are:
the modeling of the COVID-19 pandemic;
the metapopulation dynamics of foundation species in the Mediterranean Sea;
the spatiotemporal patterns of marine plastic pollution in the Mediterranean Sea;
the short-term instability properties of ecological and epidemiological systems;
the dynamics of water-borne and water-related diseases (cholera and schistosomiasis in particular) and the role of human mobility in promoting their spatial diffusion; and
the analysis of ecological and epidemiological processes along river networks.
In addition to scientific relevance, some of these topics have clear social and/or economic implications. This is the case, for instance, of building models for
marine plastic pollution,
the dynamics of foundation species that provide key ecosystem services (like the seagrass Posidonica oceanica in the Mediterranean Sea),
cholera epidemics (like the one that stroke Haiti in 2010),
parasitic infections (like schistosomiasis, which affects hundreds of millions of people in developing countries), and
the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mathematical models are key tools to understand drivers and controls of infectious disease dynamics and spatiotemporal dynamics in ecology.
Current research and perspectives
I am currently studying ecological interactions in the urban environment in the context of the National Biodiversity Future Center (NBFC). I am also trying to understand how a One Health approach can effectively contribute to pandemic preparedness. Moreover, I am looking into the role played by seagrasses in the global blue carbon budget. Finally, I maintain a long-standing interest for the definition of formal persistence criteria for populations living in fragmented landscapes, dendritic networks, and webs of marine protected areas, as well as for the derivation of invasion/persistence conditions for pathogens, alien species, and agricultural pests.
For more details on my research activities you can have a look at this list of publications.
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