Giulia Garcia Lorenzana

I am a postdoctoral fellow at NITMB in Chicago. I am part of the Vitelli Group and Doiron Lab at the University of Chicago.

I work at the interface between the Statistical Physics of Disordered Systems and complex biological systems, ranging from Theoretical Community Ecology to Neuroscience. I leverage tools developed for randomly interacting spins to study systems composed of interacting species or neurons. I also draw inspiration from the non-equilibrium features of biological systems, such as non-reciprocal interactions, to define novel classes of models with emergent properties that could be widespread in living systems. At NITMB, I’m studying how spatial structure impacts the spontaneous activity of biological neural networks.

I obtained my PhD thesis in Theoretical Physics at École Normale Supérieure and Université Paris Cité, under the supervision of Giulio Biroli and Ada Altieri.