Irene Giardina is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Physics Department of Sapienza University of Rome. She has a background in statistical physics, and worked for several years on problems related to glassy and non-equilibrium behaviour in condensed matter systems (spin glasses/structural glasses) and interdisciplinary applications. In 2005 she started working on biological systems and founded with Andrea Cavagna, the COBBS Lab (Collective Behaviour in Biological Systems - www.cobbs.it), the first lab to collect 3D large-scale experimental data in the field on flocking and swarming behaviour, and to build theory starting directly from the data.
Her group applies a statistical physics approach to understand how collective behaviour emerges in animal groups and – more broadly – in biological systems. The main aim is to provide empirical basis and to theoretically develop a statistical physics of living matter, up to the behavioural scale. The COBBS group uses experiments in the field and in the lab, computer vision and imaging techniques, numerical modelling and field theory approaches to investigate collective and response behaviour, scaling and universality in a variety of living systems at the micro and macro scale (cells, flocks and swarms).
In 2010 Prof. Giardina was awarded an ERC Starting-Consolidator grant funded by the European Research Council for the project SWARM on collective behaviour in animal groups and later in 2015 an ERC-Proof of Concept grant - PROCEEDS. In 2021 she was awarded, together with Andrea Cavagna, the Delbruck prize in Biological Physics of the American Physical Society.