Federico Ghimenti

I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Institute of Theoretical Physics, working independently in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University.

My broad research interest lies in how complex high dimensional systems function and operate, with a particular focus on microbial communities and computational systems, from analog computing devices to neural networks. Indeed, all these system are composed by many individual units, and robustly perform specific functions that cannot be carried on by their individual constituents alone. How do these functions emerge? What are their fundamental limits? I address these questions using computational and theoretical tools from the statistical physics of nonequilibrium and disordered systems.

I obtained my PhD on July 2024, working in the Laboratoire Matière et Systèmes Complexes at Université Paris Cité, under the supervision of Frédéric van Wijland. I investigated how and to what extent ideas from nonequilibrium statistical mechanics can be leveraged to speed up sampling in glassy and amorphous systems. My thesis can be found here.