Full Professor

Raffaella Burioni is Full Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Parma, where she leads the Research Groups in Statistical Physics and Complex Systems. Her research sits at the interface of statistical physics, complex systems, and interdisciplinary applications to neuroscience and neural networks. She earned her Physics degree with highest honors from the Second University of Rome "Tor Vergata" and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Rome "La Sapienza". Following postdoctoral positions at the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and the University of Milan, she received a research grant from the National Institute of Matter (INFM) and joined its Parma section, launching her independent research career.
Her work addresses the dynamics of complex systems, anomalous transport in heterogeneous media, diffusion on complex networks, reconstruction and prediction of patterns in temporal networks, and learning dynamics in real and artificial neural systems. She has authored over 140 peer-reviewed publications in leading journals, including PNAS and Nature Communications, given numerous invited keynote lectures, and holds a patent in her field. She was in the organizing committee of the Netsci Satellite “Network Neuroscience” conferences from 2015 to 2019, fostering the intersection of network science and neuroscience.
Professor Burioni has coordinated several major research projects, including the DYNSYSMATH initiative on non-equilibrium dynamics in complex systems. Within the MNESYS project, she investigates the digital reconstruction of the Action Observation Network in primates and study mechanisms of feature learning in artificial neural networks.
She serves on the editorial boards of Physical Review E, Journal of Physics A, and JSTAT, and was long-term editor of Nature Scientific Reports. She is Chair of the European Physical Society Division on Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, founding Vice-President of the Italian Society of Statistical Physics (SIFS), and regional coordinator of the Italian Chapter of the Complex Systems Society.