Palermo University Italy
He is one of the leading pioneers in the field of econophysics. He started to work in the area of the analysis and modeling of social and economic systems with tools and concepts of statistical physics as early as in 1990. He published the first econophysics paper in a physics journal in 1991. He co-authored the first econophysics paper in Nature, in 1995. In 1999 he published the first book on econophysics. Just after Mantegna earned his tenured position in 1999, he founded the Observatory of Complex Systems (http://ocs.unipa.it ), a research group of the Dipartimento di Fisica of Palermo University. Mantegna has participated in several international research projects contributing to the management and coordination of them. Examples are the COST P10 action ”Physics of Risk” and the GIACS (General Integration of the Applications of Complexity in Science) coordination action of the European Union. Within the GIACS coordination action he has promoted the ”Jerusalem Declaration on Data Access, Use and Dissemination for Scientific Research”.