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,
colloid
A colloid is a mixture in which one substance consisting of microscopically dispersed insoluble particles is suspended throughout another substance. Some definitions specify that the particles must be dispersed in a liquid, while others exte ...
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
In chemistry, a hydrogen bond (H-bond) is a specific type of molecular interaction that exhibits partial covalent character and cannot be described as a purely electrostatic force. It occurs when a hydrogen (H) atom, Covalent bond, covalently b ...
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, United States. BU was founded in 1839 by a group of Boston Methodism, Methodists with its original campus in Newbury (town), Vermont, Newbur ...
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). Postdocs most commonly, but not always, have a temporary acade ...
Sapienza University of Rome
The Sapienza University of Rome (), formally the Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza", abbreviated simply as Sapienza ('Wisdom'), is a Public university, public research university located in Rome, Italy. It was founded in 1303 and is ...
, 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 a scientific abstract and citation database, launched by the academic publisher Elsevier as a competitor to older Web of Science in 2004. The ensuing competition between the two databases has been characterized as "intense" and is c ...
, 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 success indicators such as winning t ...
is 93. Google Scholar lists 38415 citations and an H-index of 105 . Thanks to these bibliometric indexes, he is ranked among the top 10 Italian Physicists in activity.