Physics for the pedestrian society of the future

Alessandro Corbetta is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Applied Physics at Eindhoven University of Technology. His research activity is at the interface between complex flowing matter, physics for society and machine learning for non-linear physical systems. Since 2012, in the context of the "Crowdflow" topical group, is interested in furthering our fundamental understanding of pedestrian crowd flows. He aims at quantitative models for the emergent physics of crowds to allow safer and more efficient pedestrian environments. To this purpose, in collaboration with national and international facility managers of, e.g., municipalities, museums, and festivals, he established numerous real-life crowd tracking experiments. He is furthermore active  in the application of recent machine and deep learning techniques to the analysis of highly complex and non-linear physical systems and, in particular, fluid turbulence.

Alessandro Corbetta obtained his MSc (cum laude) in Mathematical Engineering from Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy, in 2011, after interning at Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory (NM, US). Working on fundamental physical aspects and applied aspects of the flow of human crowds, in 2016, he earned a PhD at the Centre for Analysis, Scientific computing and Applications, Eindhoven University of Technology (Department of Mathematics and Computer Science), and a second PhD, in Structural Engineering, from Polytechnic University of Turin. In 2016, he joined the Department of Applied Physics, Eindhoven University Technology, as post-doctoral researcher, where, in 2019, he became a University Researcher and Assistant Professor in 2021. In 2018, he received a VENI grant by the NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) on the topic of understanding and controlling human crowd flows. Since 2019, he serves in the editorial board of the multidisciplinary journal Collective Dynamics.