Francesco Sciortino (born December 29, 1960) is an Italian physicist and Full Professor at Sapienza University of Rome. He has made seminal contributions to statistical physics, including the thermodynamic and dynamic theory of complex fluids like water, colloids, colloidal-polymer mixtures, patchy particles, and DNA-based materials. He is one of the original proponents of the "second liquid critical point" theory of water.
Education
Sciortino was awarded a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Palermo in 1989 working on the coupling between biomolecules and the solvent, and focusing on the role of water's hydrogen bond cooperativity in supramolecular arrangement of biomolecules. After the Ph.D., Sciortino became Research Assistant in the Center for polymer studies of
Boston University
Boston University (BU) is a Private university, private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with ...
, working in the group of Prof.
H. Eugene Stanley
Harry Eugene Stanley (born March 28, 1941) is an American physicist and University Professor at Boston University. He has made seminal contributions to statistical physics and is one of the pioneers of interdisciplinary science. His current r ...
.
Academic career
Following his
postdoctoral research
A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). The ultimate goal of a postdoctoral research position is to pu ...
Sapienza University of Rome
The Sapienza University of Rome ( it, Sapienza – Università di Roma), also called simply Sapienza or the University of Rome, and formally the Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza", is a public research university located in Rome, Ita ...
, where he became assistant professor in 1993, associate professor in 2000, and full professor in 2005. He serves as Associate Editor of the
Journal of Chemical Physics
''The Journal of Chemical Physics'' is a scientific journal published by the American Institute of Physics that carries research papers on chemical physics. which explains water's anomalous behaviour with the presence of a hidden critical point in supercooled water. Experimental verification of this hypothesis has been obtained numerically in several models of water, and finally confirmed with scattering experiments using X-ray pulses.
Sciortino has worked extensively on the physics of arrested states of matter, making seminal contribution to Mode Coupling theory and the Potential Energy Landscape formalism. He and his collaborators hypothesised a novel type of glass (re-entrant glass) in short-range attractive colloidal systems, and this prediction was later confirmed by several experiments and numerical simulations.
Sciortino and his co-authors were also the first to identify colloidal gels as the outcome of a dynamical arrested phase separation process. His contributions to the physics of reduced valence interactions are numerous: the discovery of empty liquids, equilibrium gels, re-entrant topological transitions in network fluids, among many others
According to
Scopus
Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top-l ...
, Sciortino's work has been cited 27315 times, and his
H-index
The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with obvious success indicators such as ...
is 89. Google Scholar lists 34831 citations and an H-index of 100. Thanks to these bibliometric indexes, he is ranked among the top 10 Italian Physicists in activity.