Summary
Francesco Puccioni is a PhD student at Imperial College of London. He works in the biomathematics research group led and supervised by Dr Thomas Philipp.
Francesco earned a Master's Degree in Physics of Complex Systems at the University of Turin in collaboration with Politecnico di Torino. His Master Degree thesis was focused on the key role played by dynamical phase transitions in Katz-Lebowitz-Spohn models and was published in a scientific journal (paper_link )
His current research is mainly focused on the theoretical description of cell populations and on the role played by cell heterogeneity on cell population evolution. De facto, the stochastic characterization of the link between cell plasticity and the growth of the whole population, is still an open challenge.
Francesco's results describe the stochastic evolution of cell populations where cells are represented by agents who divide, die, convert to other species, and rejuvenate in response to an internal continuous state that increases with time.
Francesco's research also led to the first stochastic characterization of age-structured birth-death processes in time-dependent environments.
At the moment, his research is focused on the theoretical modelling of dormancy in breast cancer and he is also working on the stochastic behaviour of cell tumour memory.