Who Am I

My name is Alessandro Cossard and I am a Physicist of Complex Systems.

After completing my Ph.D. in Chemical and Materials Science, I am currently working as a crystal engineer at the chemistry department of the University of Turin. My current job involves developing advanced artificial intelligence for drug discovery and data analysis in the field of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance.

My story so far:

I took my bachelor in Physics and my master of Complex Systems in 2017.

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 scientific support. Finally, based on these data, we built an Artificial Intelligence model classifier to detect twitter users into pro-vax and anti-vax with an accuracy of 95%. This study is published at the 14th International Conference on Web and Social Media and has already more than 100 citations (https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/7285)

In November 2019 I started my Ph.D. in Chemistry and Material Science. My main work was to implement 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 papers on 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

We also created a GitHub repository, named CRYSTALpytools, with a lot of useful Python methods, playing as an interface for the CRYSTAL code (https://github.com/crystal-code-tools/CRYSTALpytools).

Furthermore, in 2020 I have been named Expert of the subject (the award name in Italian is “Cultore della Materia“) in Physical Chemistry.

All the implementations I made through the years in the CRYSTAL code are available from the latest version of the code, CRYSTAL23. All the details can be found there https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jctc.2c00958

In parallel with my academic research, I usually give lectures on 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.

Finally, I am a basic calisthenics coach, because I strongly believe in sports and in a healthy lifestyle.