Maria Rita D'Orsogna
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Maria Rita Rosaria D'Orsogna (born 1972) is an Italian and American applied mathematician and environmental advocate. She is a professor of mathematics at California State University, Northridge, where her research interests include mathematical biology, swarm behaviour, quantitative methods in criminology, and quantifying drug overdoses.[1] She is also known for a successful campaign to prevent offshore drilling for oil in Abruzzo, Italy.
Academics
D'Orsogna earned a laurea in physics from the University of Padua in 1996, focusing on statistical mechanics and mentored by Attilio L. Stella. After a master's degree from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1998, supervised by Theodore L. (Ted) Einstein, she completed a Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2003. Her dissertation, Charge transfer in DNA: the role of thermal fluctuations and of symmetry, was jointly chaired by Joseph Rudnick and Robijn Bruinsma.[4]
She became a postdoctoral researcher in chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology from 2003 to 2004, and then in the mathematics department at UCLA from 2004 to 2007. She took her present position as a professor in the mathematics department at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) in 2007. At CSUN, she also became affiliated with the Institute for Sustainability in 2008. She added an adjunct professorship in computational medicine at UCLA in 2012.[5] At UCLA, she was associate director of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics from 2018 to 2021.[6]
The D'Orsogna model, used to describe the collective motion of self-propelled particles in physics, is named after her.[7]
