I am Fabio Menegazzo, a Ph.D. student at the LIPh lab at the University of Padova, under the supervision of prof. Suweis.

I obtained my Bachelor’s degree at the University of Trento and my Master’s degree at the University of Padova. During my Master’s studies, I was exposed to the physics of complex systems, and I decided to pursue this field of study in the following part of my career. For my Master’s thesis, which I carried out under the supervision of prof. Azaele and prof. Maritan, I studied a consumer-resource model of a microbial community equipped with some simple features, with the aim of finding a small set of simple mechanisms enabling coexistence of many species competing for a single shared resource; in other words, our aim was to find a solution to a long-lasting problem in ecology: the “Paradox of the plankton”.

My Ph.D. project focuses on the sustainability of common-pool resources, i.e. goods that can be potentially harvested by any individual within a community, such as the fish in the sea. The aim is to find the conditions in which the members of the community adopt a cooperative behavior, leading to a wise, sustainable use of the resource. The theoretical work will be supported by the launch of an online gaming platform, with which we will collect data regarding the resource-harvesting tendencies of people around the world.

In general, I am interested in the modeling of complex systems, be they biological, social, or neurological ones, and in the study of the many interesting properties that emerge from such assemblies of simple interacting units.