Dr. Santo Fortunato, physicist of the Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI) in Turin (Italy), is this year’s recipient of the “Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics” of the German Physical Society (DPG). The Prize, endowed with 5000 euros, has been donated by the company d-fine.

Dr. Fortunato was awarded for his far-reaching contributions to the understanding of the structure of complex networks, of the dynamics of social systems and of the statistical properties of citation distributions in science.

His best known studies focus on the structure of complex networks. Dr. Fortunato discovered a fundamental limit in the resolution of a popular class of algorithms to detect clusters in networks. This result has far-reaching consequences for the applicability of data- driven procedures for the analysis of networks.

Other publications show that social processes like opinion formation and voting behavior display properties like scaling laws and universality, and that they can therefore be described by methods and models from physics. These results establish Dr. Fortunato as a pioneer of the young field of Sociophysics.

The research of Dr. Fortunato in the field of bibliometrics is also of far-reaching significance. His discovery of the universal statistical behavior of citation distributions opens the way to an objective comparison of scientific performance across different disciplines.

Dr. Fortunato was born in 1971 in Augusta, Italy, and studied Physics at the University of Catania (Italy). In 2000 he got his PhD in theoretical particle physics at the University of Bielefeld (Germany). During successive research periods at Indiana University in Bloomington (Indiana, USA) and at the Complex Networks and Systems Lagrange Laboratory of the Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI) in Turin, Dr. Fortunato turned to complex systems research. He is now leader of a research group at ISI.

The prize will be awarded in Dresden on March 14th, during the spring meeting of the German Physical Society. The awardee will give a presentation on his research.

Further information

on the awardee: http://sites.google.com/site/santofortunato/home

on the prize: http://www.phi-soe.de/ (click on “Young Scientist Award”)

on the DPG meeting: http://www.dpg-physik.de/presse/tagungen/2011/index.html