Prof. Zapperi is currently professor of theoretical condensed matter physics at the University of Milano, coordinator of the Center for Complexity and Biosystems and founding partner and member of the board of Complexdata S.R.L. He was recently visiting professor at LMU Munich and FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, thanks to the Humboldt Research Award. He is an expert in the statistical mechanics of non-equilibrium complex systems and has contributed to the fields of fracture, plasticity, friction, magnetism and biophysics. His most notable contributions include the theory of the Barkhausen effect in magnets, the statistical physics description of dislocations dynamics and plasticity, the analysis of size effects in fracture and recent work on the physics of cancer. He published more than 200 scientific papers in the top scientific journals, including 4 in Nature, 3 in Science, 4 in PNAS and 32 in Phys. Rev. Lett. gathering more than 12000 citations (scholar). In 2017, he co-authored with Caterina La Porta a book on the Physics of Cancer. Prof. Zapperi is the recipent of numerous awards including the Marie Curie Excellence Award, the Humboldt Research Award and an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. He was elected fellow of the American Physical Society, named Finland Distinguished Professor by the Academy of Finland. He is member of the editorial boards of JSTAT and Physical Biology. He organized several international workshops, summer schools and symposia on a variety of interdisciplinary research topics, ranging from the “Physics of Cancer” to Statistical Physics of Materials and Complex Systems. He has been elected member of the council and the executive committe of the Complex Systems Society and acted as chair of the steering committee of the Conference on Complex Systems.