Giovanni Vignale

Giovanni Vignale (born in Naples, Italy, 1957), is Curators' Professor of Physics at the University of Missouri-Columbia. After graduating from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa in 1979 and gaining his PhD at Northwestern University in 1984, he worked as a postdoc at the Max-Planck-Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany and at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

He joined the Physics Department at the University of Missouri in 1988 and was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1997. He has been a visiting scientist at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste and at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa; a member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California; and an Ikerbasque Fellow at the European Theoretical Spectroscopy Facility in San Sebastian, Spain. Giovanni Vignale's main areas of research are many-body theory and density functional theory of electronic systems - two areas in which he has published more than 160 research papers.

He is an avid reader of about everything and a prolific unpublished writer of poems and short stories. He loves long distance running (two marathons in 2001 and 2003) and windsurfing, and intensely dislikes soccer, of which he advocates the abolition.