Giovanni Naldi, Professor of Numerical Analysis, Department of Mathematics, University of Milan recently visited the Amritapuri campus of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham as part of the Indo-Italian Program of Cooperation.

This Program supported by the respective national governments intends to promote scientific and technological cooperation between the Italian Republic and the Republic of India during 2012-2014.

Scientists and research scholars from the areas of Biotechnology, Agriculture and Food Sciences, Design Engineering, Information and Communication Technology, Energy and Environment, Health and Medicine, Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, Space and Physics can avail research grants to work on collaborative projects.

Prof. Naldi’s area of research encompasses the building of numerical models for neurosciences.

Having authored hundreds of journal papers on the subject, Prof. Naldi’s research has greatly contributed to the development of this field. His students work on mathematical modeling of neurons, other structures in the brain and biophysics.

Prof. Naldi’s books include Mathematical Modeling of Collective Behavior in Socio Economic Settings and Life Sciences and Multi-Scale and Adaptive Modeling, Numerics and Applications.

The interaction between Amrita and Prof. Naldi began in 2004, when Shyam Diwaker who was working at the Center for Computational Engineering at Amrita’s Coimbatore campus, enrolled for a doctoral program under Prof. Naldi’s guidance.

Now Dr. Shyam Diwaker leads a research group working in computational neurosciences at the Amrita School of Biotechnology. The group has undertaken collaborative research with a three-way partnership with the University of Milan and the University of Pavia’s neurophysiological group.

Together, the scientists are creating detailed models of cerebellar cells and their network functions.

“It is a great pleasure for me to be here. Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham is like family to me and it is a joyful feeling to actually meet my family members,” stated Prof. Naldi, after interacting with colleagues at Amrita.

“It is a great privilege to have Prof. Naldi in our midst,” stated Dr. Bipin Nair, Dean.

Prof. Naldi was taken on a tour of the Amrita campuses and he was impressed with what he saw.

“Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham is interdisciplinary to such an extent that many universities in Italy cannot even imagine. I am happy to see the Amrita Center for Nanosciences as well as research in the latest technologies of haptics for vocational education,” he commented.

“Amrita is a great place to help students understand the world from a scientific point of view and also from a human point of view,” he summed up.

August 10, 2012
School of Biotechnology, Amritapuri