Massimo Vergassola

Massimo Vergassola is an Italian physicist, who worked at the University of California, San Diego from 2013-2019. He is now a Professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and Directeur de Recherche at CNRS. He is Director of the ENS-PSL QBio initiative on Quantitative Biology, an initiative at the PariSanté Val-de-Grâce Campus.[1]

Vergassola uses physics to study the sense of smell and olfactory navigation in turbulent environments.[2] For example, he has shown the importance of a zig-zag search pattern to deal with odor plumes that have been broken into fragments due to turbulence.[3] In 2007, Vergassola proposed a strategy called infotaxis for use by odor-sensing robots. Infotaxis involves the creation of a mental model of where an odor source is likely to be, based on previously collected information. The robot moves in a direction that will maximize information to find the smell. Early versions of the model involved a mathematical quantity called Shannon entropy, which calculates unpredictability (high in unexplored directions and low in explored directions).[4] Another area of interest in the physics of living systems, is the physics of embryonic development.[1]

Vergassola is an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society.[5][6][7]