M. Ángeles Serrano

M. Ángeles Serrano

Universitat de Barcelona

Experimental Sciences & Mathematics

M. Ángeles Serrano is an ICREA Research Professor at the Dept. of Condensed Matter Physics of the University of Barcelona (UB). She holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from UB and a master in mathematics for finance from the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica CRM. After four years as IT consultant and mutual fund manager, she returned to academia in 2004 to work in complexity science within the franework of network science. She conducted postdoctoral research at Indiana University (USA), the EPFL (Switzerland), and IFISC Institute (Spain). She came back to Barcelona in 2009, when she was awarded a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship at UB. M. Ángeles obtained the Outstanding Referee Award of the American Physical Society and belongs to the Editorial Board of the APS journal Physical Review Research. She is a founding member of Complexitat, the Catalan network for the study of complex systems, and a promoter member of UBICS, the UB Institute of Complex Systems.

Research interests

Complex systems -e.g. the human brain, the Internet, molecular networks in the cell, international trade, and many more- are ubiquitous and around us. All of them, regardless of their origin, talk a common language that we are starting to understand. A major challenge for a better comprehension of the relation between their structure and function, and so for the prediction of their evolution and adaptation capabilities, is the characterization of their multiscale nature in space and time. I am using netwoks to investigate the role of space in real complex systems, producing maps in a hidden geometry where distances measure the likelihood of interactions. Our focus is also on the impact of time flow, and on multilayer networks in which different types of interactions between a diversity of elements coexist. Our applications cover a wide variety of real systems, from biological to economic and sociotechnological systems, that we characterize using massive data.

Selected publications

- Almagro P, Boguna M & Serrano MA 2022, 'Detecting the ultra low dimensionality of real networks', Nature Communications, 13, 1, 6096.

- Ortiz E & Serrano MA 2022, 'Multiscale voter model on real networks', Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 165, 2, 112847.

- Aliakbarisani R, Ghasemi A & Serrano MA 2022, 'Perturbation of the normalized Laplacian matrix for the prediction of missing links in real networks', IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, 9, 2, 863 - 874.

- Serrano MA & Boguñá M 2022, The Shortest Path to Network Geometry: A Practical Guide to Basic Models and Applications (Elements in Structure and Dynamics of Complex Networks). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

- van der Kolk J, Serrano MA & Boguna M 2022, 'An anomalous topological phase transition in spatial random graphs', Communications Physics, 5, 1, 245.

Selected research activities

Director of PhD thesis, Mapping complexity through Network Geometry: Structure and dynamics of real-world networks, Dr. Elisenda Ortiz, Universitat de Barcelona, January 2012.
PI of new grant, Hyperbolic Dimensional Reduction Techniques for Classification of Complex Data in Digital Environments (HYPERDATA), Proyectos de Transición Ecológica y Digital 2021, Agencia Estatal de Investigación (TED2021-129791B-I00).
Editorial Board member of APS journal Physical Review Research
Scientic Board member of the Universitat de Barcelona Institute of Complex Systems UBICS
Member of the jury of the City of Barcelona Award 2021 in the category Experimental Sciences and Technology