Speaker

Alessandro Fontana

Biography :

Alessandro Fontana leads a dual career: by day, he is a cybersecurity expert for a multinational corporation; by night and on weekends, he pursues research in theoretical biology and artificial life, seeking to unravel the mysteries of life using computational tools. Over the years, he has developed a model known as Epigenetic Tracking (ET). While traditional life sciences often rely on a bottom-up approach, seeking to infer general principles from genes and proteins, his work employs a top-down strategy, beginning with high-level abstractions and progressing toward hypotheses about low-level molecular processes. Consequently, the ET model may incorporate elements that do not strictly reflect current biological knowledge, but which could inspire biologists to explore new, uncharted directions.