报告人简介：GIOVANNI VIGNALE is Visiting Research Professor at the Institute for Functional Intelligent Materials (IFI) at the National University of Singapore, and Emeritus Curators’ Professor of Physics at the University of Missouri-Columbia. After graduating from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa in 1979 and gaining his PhD at Northwestern University in 1984, he worked as a postdoc at the Max-Planck-Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany and at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He joined the Physics Department at the University of Missouri in 1988 and was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1997. He has been a visiting scientist at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste and at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa; a member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, an Ikerbasque Fellow at the European Theoretical Spectroscopy Facility in San Sebastian, Spain, and a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Solid State Physics of the University of Tokyo and at Yale-NUS in Singapore. Giovanni Vignale’s area of research is the many-body theory of electronic materials and devices -- a field in which he has about 300 papers in print. His research has been funded by the NSF, the DOE, and the ARO. In the 1980s and 1990s he pioneered the application of density functional theory to systems in strong magnetic fields and developed the viscoelastic theory of time-dependent electronic systems. In recent years he has contributed to the field of spintronics through theoretical studies of spin transport, which led to the prediction and experimental verification of the "spin Coulomb drag", and orbital moment transport. He is author of two books “Quantum Theory of the Electron Liquid” (Cambridge University Press, 2005) (with G. F. Giuliani) and, “The Beautiful Invisible – Imagination, Creativity and Theoretical Physics” (Oxford University Press, 2011) and more are coming.