MARC JEAN MEZARD

I teach quantum and statistical physics at the undergrad level, and a doctoral course on complex systems in information theory, computer science, and physics.

I am a Professor of Theoretical Physics. I studied physics at Ecole normale supérieure in Paris and I obtained my PhD in 1984. Hired at CNRS in Paris, I was Research Director in Université Paris Sud. From 2012 and 2022 I became Director of Ecole normale supérieure, and I then joined Bocconi University as a professor, in the newly created department of computational sciences.  My work focuses on statistical physics of disordered systems, with applications in various fields like information theory, computer science, machine learning, biophysics.

Creating a largely interdisciplinary new department of computational sciences, with colleagues from mathematics, physics, computer science, computational biology, is an exciting new challenge.

I am interested in the emergent phenomena in complex systems with many interacting “atoms”, (that could be for instance agents on a market, information bits, or molecules are different or live in different environments. The statistical physics of disordered systems that I contribute to develop finds applications in various branches of science – biology, economics and finance, information theory, computer science, statistics, signal processing. In recent years my research has focused on information processing in neural networks, machine learning and deep networks. I am particularly interested in the theoretical impact of data structure on learning strategies and generalization performance.