Michele Cirafici is an associate professor in mathematical physics at the University of Trieste. He earned his PhD in theoretical high energy physics at SISSA in 2004. After 5 years of postdoc experience in Europe, he held position as auxiliary investigator and principal investigator at the Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon. His research interests include string theory and quantum field theory, quantum gravity and operator algebras, algebraic and enumerative geometry, and topological data analysis.