Alessandro Pluchino is associate professor of theoretical physics, mathematical methods and models, at the Department of Physics and Astronomy “E.Majorana” of the University of Catania and has also the qualification of full professor in Theoretical Physics of fundamental interactions. He is delegate of research at INFN  local coordinator of LINCOLN (Learning Complex Networks) and staff member of DYNSYSMATH. He is also member of the Società Italiana di Fisica and the Complex Systems Society. He is currently the Unict referent for the Piano Nazionale Lauree Scientifiche (PLS) Physics.

His research activity mainly focuses on the elaboration of mathematical and computational models of complex systems, through the network analysis and agent-based models tools, but he also addresses fundamental physics issues, statistical mechanics, complex networks and chaos theory, with applications to biological, geological, ecological, economic and social systems. He is also interested in developing optimization methods, with applications to management engineering, infrastructures, energy and transportations, in the context of smart-sities and sustainability. He is Editorial Board member of several scientific journals, among which PLOSONE, ENTROPY and FRONTIERS IN PHYSICS.

Author of more than 100 scientific publications, among which several books, and speaker at numerous international conferences, he is also actively engaged in scientific dissemination for a non-specialist audience. In 2010 he was awarded, with Andrea Rapisarda and Cesare Garofalo, of the Ig-Nobel Prize for Management at Harvard University and MIT. Then, in 2022, he received a second Ig-Nobel prize, this time for Economics, again with Andrea Rapisarda and with Alessio Emanuele Biondo.