Team Members

Dr. Sette is currently a Professor at the La Jolla Institute’s Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Discovery, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Medicine, of the University of California San Diego. Dr. Sette he studied in Biological Sciences from the University of Rome and did postdoctoral work at the National Jewish Center for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine in Denver, Colorado. In 1988, Dr. Sette joined Howard Grey, M.D. at the newly founded Cytel, in La Jolla, and was also appointed as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at The Scripps Research Institute. He founded Epimmune in 1997, where he served both as Vice President of Research and Chief Scientific Officer until 2002, when he joined LJI.

Andrea Alù is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), the Einstein Professor of Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Founding Director of the Photonics Initiative at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center, and a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the City College of New York. He received his Laurea (2001), MS (2003) and PhD (2007) from the University of Roma Tre, and was the Temple Foundation Endowed Professor at the University of Texas at Austin until 2018.

In 2015 he was the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) Visiting Professor at the AMOLF Institute in the Netherlands. His research interests span over applied electromagnetics, nano-optics, polaritonics and acoustics. Alù is credited with a number of discoveries, including the first experimental demonstration of a three-dimensional electromagnetic cloak, of nonreciprocal phenomena in magnet-free metamaterials, of electromagnetic time-reflections and of extreme nonlinearities in quantum-engineered metasurfaces.

Dr. Alù is the President of the Metamorphose Virtual Institute for Artificial Electromagnetic Materials and Metamaterials, the Director of the Simons Collaboration on Extreme Wave Phenomena Driven by Symmetries and the Chair of the IEEE Joint New York Chapter.

He is the Editor-in-Chief of Optical Materials Express, a Simons Investigator in Physics since 2016, a Full Member of URSI, a Life Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the Materials Research Society (MRS), Optica, the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) and the American Physical Society (APS). Since 2017, he has been a Highly Cited Researcher (Clarivate Web of Science).

He has received several awards and recognitions for his research activities, including the Max Born Award (2024), the SPIE Mozi Award (2024), the IEEE AP-S Distinguished Achievement Award (2023), the Brillouin Medal (2021), the Blavatnik National Award in Physical Sciences and Engineering (2021), the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award (2020), the DoD Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (2019), the ICO Prize in Optics (2016), the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Engineering (2016), the NSF Alan T. Waterman Award (2015), the Franco Strazzabosco Award for Young Engineers (2013), the URSI Issac Koga Gold Medal (2011).

Silvio Micali has been on the faculty at MIT, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, since 1983. Silvio’s research interests are cryptography, zero knowledge, pseudorandom generation, secure protocols, and mechanism design and blockchain. In particular, Silvio is the co-inventor of probabilistic encryption, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Verifiable Random Functions and many of the protocols that are the foundations of modern cryptography.

In 2017, Silvio founded Algorand, a fully decentralized, secure, and scalable blockchain which provides a common platform for building products and services for a borderless economy. At Algorand, Silvio oversees all research, including theory, security and crypto finance.

Silvio is the recipient of the Turing Award (in computer science), of the Gödel Prize (in theoretical computer science) and the RSA prize (in cryptography). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Accademia dei Lincei.

Silvio has received his Laurea in Mathematics from the University of Rome, and his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini is (since August '99) Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona, member of the Department of Linguistics, of the Cognitive Science Program, of the Department of Psychology, and honorary member of the Department of Management and Society. From January 1994 to July 1999 he was director of the Department of Cognitive Science (Dipsco), of the Scientific Institute San Raffaele, in Milan (Italy), and professor of Cognitive Psychology at the San Raffaele University. From September 1985 to December 1993 he was Principal Research Scientist at the Center for Cognitive Science of MIT.

He has been a visiting professor at Harvard University (Fall 2020, Spring 2007, 1989 and 1988), the University of Maryland (Fall 2006),  at MIT (Fall 2003 and Spring 1993), at the Collège de France (Paris, May-June 2002), Rutgers University, NJ (Fall 1992), and at the University of Bologna (Spring 1997 and 1998). In August 1990 he was the chairman and organizer of the XII Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, held at MIT.

From 1980 to 1985 he has been the Director of the Florence Center for the History and Philosophy of Science (Florence, Italy); from 1974 to 1979, the Director of the Royaumont Center for A Science of Man (Chaired by the Nobel laureate Jacques Monod) in Paris, and lecturer at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris-Sorbonne). He obtained his doctorate in Physics at the University of Rome in 1968.

His books in English: "Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule our Minds" (Wiley, 1994); with Jerry Fodor "What Darwin Got Wrong" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

Dr. Ferrajoli is an academic hematologist/oncologist practicing in the Leukemia Department at the University of Texas, MD Anderson since 2001. Her main area of interest include the treatment and biology of chronic lymphocytic leukemia and its variants, and treatment of elderly patients with acute and chronic leukemia. She has authored and co-authored more than three hundred and fifty publications in peer reviewed journals. Dr. Ferrajoli serves on numerous journal editorial boards and grant proposal study sessions for several US and European Agencies. She is a member of professional societies such the American Society of Hematology (ASH), the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), International Society of Geriatric Oncology (SIOG), the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) and the European Hematology Association (EHA).

Dr. Ferrajoli is Professor of Medicine, Deputy Chair, Department of Leukemia;

Patient Safety and Quality Officer, Department of Leukemia;

Associate Medical Director, Leukemia Center;

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Filippo Menczer is a university distinguished professor, the Luddy professor of informatics and computer science, and the Director of the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has courtesy appointments in cognitive science and physics. He holds a Laurea in Physics from the Sapienza University of Rome and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego.

Dr. Menczer is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the Center for Computer-Mediated Communication, a Senior Research Fellow of The Kinsey Institute, and a member of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS). He previously served as division chair in the IUB School of Informatics and Computing, director of CNetS, visiting scientist at Yahoo Research, Fellow of the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation in Torino, Italy, and Fellow-at-large of the Santa Fe Institute. He has been the recipient of Fulbright, Rotary Foundation, and NATO fellowships, a Career Award from the National Science Foundation, and the ICWSM Test of Time Award from AAAI.

His research interests span Web and data science, computational social science, science of science, and modeling of complex information networks. In the last fifteen years, his lab has led efforts to study online misinformation spread and to develop tools to detect and counter social media manipulation.

This work has been covered in many US and international news sources, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, PBS, CNN, BBC, Economist, Guardian, Atlantic, Reuters, Science, and Nature. Menczer received multiple service awards and currently serves as associate editor of the Network Science journal and on the editorial boards of EPJ Data Science, PeerJ Computer Science, and HKS Misinformation Review.

Franco Einaudi (1937-2020) had a distinguished career in the field of Earth Sciences. He was a Professor of Geophysical Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Director of the Earth Sciences Division at the NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He was one of the Founding Members of ISSNAF.

Matteo Maggiori is an Associate Professor of Finance and the Fletcher Jones Faculty Scholar for 2020-21 at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

His research focuses on international macroeconomics and finance. He is a co-founder and director of the Global Capital Allocation Project. His research topics have included the analysis of exchange rate dynamics, global capital flows, the international financial system, the role of the dollar as a reserve currency, tax havens, bubbles, expectations and portfolio investment, and very long-run discount rates. His research combines theory and data with the aim of improving international economic policy. He is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research affiliate at the Center for Economic Policy Research. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.

Among a number of honors, he is the recipient of the 2021 Fisher Black Prize awarded for the best financial economist under the age of 40, the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2019 Carlo Alberto Medal for the best Italian economist under the age of 40. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (CAREER grant).

Matteo Maggiori | Stanford Graduate School of Business

Franco Pierno, born in Canada and educated in Europe, received his Laurea in the History of the Italian Language from the University of Pavia. He then obtained a Ph.D. in Romance Philology by completing a thesis on Italian Linguistics at the University of Strasbourg.

He is currently a Full Professor in Italian Linguistics at the University of Toronto, Canada, and an "Accademico della Crusca" (Florence). He was trained in Italian Lexicography at the Lessico Etimologico Italiano (Saarbrücken) under the supervision of Max Pfister (†). Before coming to Toronto, he taught at the universities of Strasbourg, Basel, and Neuchâtel.

He has also been invited as a visiting researcher by the following academic institutions: John Carter Brown Library (Brown University); Centro di Dialettologia della Svizzera Italiana (Bellinzona); Centre d'Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (Tours); Fondation Maison Sciences de l'Homme (Paris, France); Université de Bordeaux; TU Universität Dresden.

Since 2021, he has been supervising the research group "OIM Canada-USA-Puerto Rico", NorthAmerican chapter of the Osservatorio degli Italianismi nel Mondo (OIM), one of the fundamental research projects of the Accademia della Crusca. The program, directed by Matthias Heinz and Lucilla Pizzolli, aims to create a database that will serve as a collection of all Italian words and words of Italian origin that are used in other languages.

Giulia Galli is the Liew Family Professor of Electronic Structure and Simulations in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the Department of Chemistry at the University of Chicago. She also holds a senior scientist position at Argonne National Laboratory, where she is a group leader and the director of the Midwest Integrated Center for Computational Materials. She is an expert in the development of theoretical and computational methods to predict and engineer material and molecular properties from first principles. Her research focuses on problems relevant to the development of sustainable energy sources and quantum technologies.

Prior to joining UChicago, she was professor of chemistry and physics at the University of California, Davis (2005-2013) and the head of the Quantum Simulations group at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL, 1998-2005). She holds a PhD in Physics from the International School of Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy.

Prof. Galli is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Science, and the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science, as well as a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is the recipient of several awards, including the Materials Research Society Theory Award, the American Physical Society David Adler Award in Materials Physics, the Feynman Nanotechnology Prize in Theory, the medal of the Schola Physica Romana and the Tomassoni-Chisesi award by La Sapienza University in Rome, Italy.

Giorgio Bellettini is Honorary Professor of Physics at the University of Pisa, where he retired in 2009, and Guest Scientist at Fermilab. He has made experiments in particle physics at Frascati, at CERN, and since 1980 at Fermilab. Since 1981 he was spokesperson of the Italian groups in the Collider Detector Facility (CDF) and Co-spokesperson of the international CDF Collaboration at the time of the discovery of the top quark. He was Director of the Italian National Laboratories of Frascati, Chairman of the ISR Committee and Member of the Science Policy Committee of CERN.

He is an author of over 850 refereed publications in international science journals, where many important results are reported including the discovery of the increasing with energy total proton-proton cross section at the CERN ISR and the discovery of the top quark at the Fermilab Tevatron.

He is APS Fellow, Commendatore of the Italian Republic, and was honored with the Carlo Matteucci Medal by the Italian Academy of Sciences in 2006.

Dr. M. Chiara Manzini is an Associate Professor at Rutgers-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in the Child Health Institute of New Jersey and the Department of Neuroscience and Cell Biology. The main goal of Dr. Manzini’s research is to bridge the genetics and mechanisms of disease to identify genes that are essential for human cognition and to define the molecular mechanisms underlying neurodevelopmental disorders focusing on autism and neuromuscular disorders.