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Biography
Massimo Boninsegni is an Italian Canadian theoretical condensed matter physicist. Born in Genova in 1963, he graduated with a Bachelor's degree in physics at the Universita' degli Studi di Genova in 1986.
He moved to the United States in 1987, where he received a doctoral degree in physics from Florida State University. He took on postdoctoral positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of Delaware, before becoming in 1997 an assistant professor of physics at San Diego State University. He moved to the University of Alberta in 2002, where he has been a professor of physics since 2005.
His research interests are in the areas of superfluidity, superconductivity, Bose-Einstein condensation and Quantum Monte Carlo simulations. His most important contribution is in computational quantum many-body physics, specifically to the development of the continuous-space Worm Algorithm for the simulation of strongly correlated Bose systems at finite temperature. He also contributed to the study of the condensed phase of molecular hydrogen, chiefly the superfluid properties of small clusters, as well as of the supersolid phase of matter.
He was awarded the status of Fellow of the American Physical Society, after being nominated by the Division of Computational Physics in 2007, for the development of a novel methodology enabling accurate, large-scale Quantum Monte Carlo simulations of interacting many-body systems, and for its application to the investigation of the supersolid phase of helium and of superfluidity of molecular hydrogen.
Massimo Boninsegni is an atheist and science blogger.