Since 2006, Renato Casagrandi serves the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Politecnico di Milano (PoliMi), as Associate Professor of Ecology. He graduated in Electronic Engineering (PoliMi, 1996) discussing a master thesis on forest fire regimes. His thesis was awarded the Italgas Prize "Idee per il futuro" (1998) as the best MSc dissertation on Environment and Energy. Under the guidance of Marino Gatto, Renato Casagrandi obtained a PhD degree in Ecology (University of Parma, 1999) with a thesis on Models for Metapopulations, part of which has been published in Nature.
After a postdoc (2000) with Simon Levin at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) of the Princeton University, he joined the Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione (DEI) at PoliMI first as Research Associate (2001-2002), then as Assistant Professor (2003-2006). He participated to many national and international research projects and he has been Visiting Scholar in different international research centers.
He visited as undergraduate (1993) and graduate (1997) student the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, as Researcher (2001-2002) the EEB at Princeton University, and as Scholar (2007) at the Institute for Advanced Studies of Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published around forty papers on ISI journals, some of which appeared in the highest impact scientific magazines (such as PNAS). His current research interests are in the wide area of population biology. More precisely, he studies the spatiotemporal dynamics of species living in both homogeneous and heterogeneous landscapes with the aim of understanding their extinction risk or the patterns generated by their movement. He's also fascinated by the puzzling complexities that emerge in epidemiological problems, especially when the infectious material propagating through agents follows non-standard transmission paths.