Who Am I

My name is Alessandro Cossard and I am a Physicist of Complex Systems. My bachelor is in Physics and my master is in Physics of Complex Systems. I am currently a Ph.D. Fellow in Chemistry and Material Science at the University of Turin. My work deals with the implementation into the software CRYSTAL of some method for the ab initio quantum simulations, in particular in the framework of the Bader’s QTAIM theory. In 2020 I have been named Expert of the subject in Chemical-Physics.

My story so far:

After my master, in 2018 I won a scholarship at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Turin. My work dealt with the implementation into the CRYSTAL software of some routines for the DFT theory. In particular, I coded in c++ some routines to calculate the second derivatives of in the framework of the Coupled Perturbated Hartree Fock method for computing the optical properties of solid-state systems. That year I had my first publication (M. DeStefanis, C. Ravoux, A. Cossard, A. Erba, Thermo-Elasticity of Materials from Quasi-Harmonic Calculations, Minerals, 9, 16 (2019). DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/min9010016) which also appeared as the cover of the number.

Later in 2018, I won another scholarship: in particular, I won the scholarship from the Lagrange Project (https://www.isi.it/en/lagrange-project/scholarships) granted by CRT foundation and so I spent one year at ISI Foundation in Turin. There, I study in deep the field of Network Science and Machine Learning, applied in the field of social goods. My and my supervisor examined the extent to which the vaccination debate on twitter is conductive to potential outreach to the vaccination hesitant. To do this, we mapped the debate among people who are in favor or against the vaccination and we found that pro-vax and anti-vax segregate into two echo-chambers which, however, have very different topologies: in fact, the pro-vax are arranged in a star-like community around some important hubs while anti-vax users are connected in a very tightly connected way, in order to reinforce their opinions which have no scientifically support. Finally, based on these data, we built a classifier to detect twitter users into pro-vax and anti-vax with an accuracy of 95%. This study will be published in the 14th International Conference on Web and Social Media and it is now available as a preprint on Arxiv (A. Cossard, g. De Francisci Morales, Kyriaki Kalimeri, Yelena Mejova, Daniela Paolotti, Michele Starnini, Falling into the echo-chamber: the Italian Vaccination Debate on Twitter, 14th International Conference on Web and Social Media (2020). https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.11906)

In November 2019 I started my Ph.D. in Chemistry and Material Science. I am currently working on implementing, into the CRYSTAL code (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRYSTAL), some routines to extend the Bader topological analysis to f and g-orbitals. At present, I published two paper about this topic:

• A. Cossard, J.K. Desmarais, S. Casassa, C. Gatti, A. Erba, Charge Density Analysis of Actinide Compounds from the Quantum Theory of Atoms in Molecules and Crystals, The journal of physical chemistry letters 12 (7), 1862-1868 (2021). https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c00100

• A. Cossard, J.K. Desmarais, S. Casassa, C. Gatti, A. Erba, Charge Density Analysis of Actinide Compounds from the Quantum Theory of Atoms in Molecules and Crystals, The journal of physical chemistry letters 12 (7), 1862-1868 (2021). https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c00100

In parallel with my academic research, I usually give lectures as scientific dissemination. Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in organizing conferences or seminars.

During the coronavirus outbreak, I started a scientific podcast (https://www.alessandrocossard.com/scienza-contro-tutti/) in order to give people notions to recognize and self-fight fake news. The podcast is in Italian.

I am also an indie developer of videogames and applications: in particular, I have a Google Developer account for my apps and videogames for Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Alessandro+Cossard) and an itc.io account only for videogames (https://coss-ale.itch.io).

Finally, I am a basic calisthenics coach (certificate), because I strong believe in sport, and I have some soft skills on social media management and business (certificate).