Vincenzo Fiorentini (born: Padova, 5
April 1960; Laurea 1987 and
PhD 1991 at University of Trieste, Italy) is associate professor of
condensed matter physics at the University of Cagliari, Italy.
He is currently (oct 2024-sep 2025) on leave as senior fellow at TU Dresden. For the last few years (July 2020 to June 2024) he has been Science Counselor of the Italian Embassy in Berlin, Germany. He can be reached at vincenzo.fiorentini@gmail.com or at +39 347 1410906.
VF has been teaching university classes since 1993 covering diverse topics in computational, solid state, condensed matter, semiconductor and surface physics, as well as electromagnetism and analytical mechanics and even introductory calculus, for Physics, Materials Science, Electronic Engineering, and Economics majors. He supervised about 30 Master/BS and a dozen PhD theses, and coordinated the work of about 30 man-years of post-graduate and post-doc
researchers. He co-organized twelve editions (1994-2006) of the Computational Materials Science workshop series, which ran from 1990 to 2006.
VF's activity is devoted to the first-principles computational physics of materials (bulk, interfaces, defects, surfaces...). He collaborates actively with experimentalists and technologists at various research centers and industries.
He has on record around 160 scientific
papers (135 on refereed journals and 10 invited + 20 on books and conference procs) 55 invited talks at international conferences, about 12k / 12k / 17k (ISI, Scopus, Google Scholar) citations, and
h=46, 46, 51 (ISI, Scopus, Google Scholar), i10=117. VF is included in the top italian scientists list published by V.I.A. Manchester.
VF features in the Stanford ranking 2020 in the top 0.5% of scientists active in physics (rank 48552 overall, 1202 in physics), and is, in particular, first in the same ranking among the currently serving professors of Cagliari University. He had multiple habilitations to full professor in the area 02/B2-Theoretical condensed matter physics, valid through 2030.
His activity was carried out, besides his present position, at the
Fraunhofer Institut for Applied Solid State Physics in Freiburg
(1987-88,1990), the University of Trieste (1989-91), the
Fritz Haber
Institut
in Berlin (1992-1993), the
Walter Schottky-Institut in Munich
(1998-2000, as a
Alexander von Humboldt fellow), as an invited professor at
NXP Research at
IMEC (2005-2006), and as a tenured lecturer at University
of
Cagliari (1993-2001). VF has been the founding director (2003-2008) of SLACS, the Sardinian Laboratory for Computational Materials Science of INFM, now an operative unit of the CNR Molecular Foundry Insitute
IOM. He serves as referee for Nature, APL, PRL, PRB, JPCM, ..., and has served in several hiring, evaluation, and management committees of a variety of different institutions, agencies, and conferences.
VF's scientific interests are currently in the area of the prediction of structural,
electronic, magnetic, ferroic, and dielectric properties of solids and related nanosystems, based on ab initio
calculations. In particular, he has recently drifted towards correlated materials physics and emergence properties. The computational methods used are density-functional
total-energy-force-stress and linear response methods, as well as
self-interaction-free density-functional techniques.
