Alex Arenas (Barcelona, 1969) is Full Professor at the Departament d’Enginyeria Informàtica i Matemàtiques (DEIM) of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili. He obtained his PhD in Physics in 1996. In 1995, he got a tenure position at DEIM, and in 1997 he became associate professor at the same department. In 2000, he was visiting scholar at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. (LBL) in the Applied Mathematics group of Prof. Alexandre Chorin (University of California, Berkeley). After this visit, he started a collaboration with Berkeley, and in 2007 he became visiting researcher of LBL. Arenas has written more than 200 interdisciplinary publications in major peer reviewed including Nature, Nature Physics, PNAS, Physics Reports and Physical Review Letters, which have received more than 12000 citations. He is one of the few Europeans serving as Associate Editors of one of the most important publication in physics worldwide, the American Physical Society journal, Physical Review E.

Research interests

His research interests are currently focused on the physics of networked multilevel complex systems. The comprehension of the interplay between the structure of the connectivity and the functionality of networked system is a major challenge for the physics of this era. Concepts that applied to the nowadays classical network theory, must be revisited in the framework of multilevel coupling scenarios, in what is being known as the physics of multilayer networks. The applicability of the understanding of the basic phenomena underlying these systems have direct applications in neuroscience, social sciences, systems biology, epidmics and computer science.

Keywords

Complex networks, multiplex networks, modular structure, synchronization, game theory, epidemic spreading