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Biography
Massimiliano Di Ventra is an American-Italian theoretical physicist who has made several contributions to Condensed-Matter Physics, especially quantum transport of atomic and nanoscale systems, non-equilibrium statistical mechanics of many-body systems, DNA sequencing by tunneling, and memelements. He suggested the memcomputing paradigm of computation, and with his group derived various analytical properties of memristive networks.
He obtained his undergraduate degree in Physics summa cum laude from the University of Trieste (Italy) in 1991 and did his PhD studies at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) in 1993–1997. He has been Visiting Scientist at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and Research Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University before joining the Physics Department of Virginia Tech in 2000 as Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2003 and moved to the Physics Department of the University of California, San Diego, in 2004 where he was promoted to Full Professor in 2006.
Di Ventra has been invited to deliver more than 300 talks worldwide on these topics (including 14 plenary/keynote presentations, 10 talks at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society, 5 at the Materials Research Society, 2 at the American Chemical Society, and 2 at the SPIE). He serves on the editorial board of several scientific journals and has won numerous awards and honors, such as the NSF Early CAREER Award, and the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award. He is fellow of the Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society.
He has published more than 200 papers in refereed journals (he was named 2018 Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics), has 4 granted patents, co-edited the textbook Introduction to Nanoscale Science and Technology (Springer-Verlag, 2004)for undergraduate students, he is single author of the graduate-level textbook Electrical Transport in Nanoscale Systems (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and of the trade book The Scientific Method: Reflections from a Practitioner (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Di Ventra has been Visiting Professor at the Technion (2017), Technical University of Dresden (2015), University of Paris-Sud (2015), Technical University of Denmark (2014), Ben-Gurion University (2013), Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (2012, 2011), and SISSA, Trieste (2012).