Sternberg Family Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University, where he is the founding director of the Northeastern Network Science Institute. Alessandro Vespignani received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees, both in physics, from the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” He completed his postdoctoral research at Yale University and Leiden University. Prof. Vespignani has worked at the International Center for Theoretical Physics (UNESCO) in Trieste and at the University of Paris Sud in France as a member of the National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS). From 2004 to 2011, Dr. Vespignani was the J.H. Rudy Professor of Computer Science and Information Technology at Indiana University and the founding director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research and associate director of the Pervasive Technology Institute. He is an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the Academy of Europe, and a Fellow of the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences at Harvard University. Dr. Vespignani’s research activity has recently focused on data-based computational modeling of epidemic and diffusion phenomena and on the study of biological factors, networks social and technological.