Alessandro Vespignani (born April 4, 1965) is an Italian-American physicist, best known for his work on complex networks, and particularly for work on the applications of network theory to the mathematical modeling of infectious disease, applications of computational epidemiology, and for studies of the topological properties of the Internet. He is currently the Sternberg Family Distinguished University Professor of Physics, Computer Science and Health Sciences at Northeastern University,[1] where he is the director of the Network Science Institute.
Vespignani and his team have contributed mathematical and computational modeling analysis on several disease outbreaks, including 2009 H1N1 flu, Ebola epidemic in West Africa, Zika epidemic, and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Vespignani is author, together with Romualdo Pastor-Satorras, of the book Evolution and Structure of the Internet. Together with Alain Barrat and Marc Barthelemy he has published in 2008 the monograph Dynamical Processes on Complex Networks.