Vito Puliafito – Curriculum

VITO PULIAFITO is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Politecnico di Bari, Italy, since June 2021. He received the degree in Electronic Engineering and a PhD in Electromagnetic Modeling at the University of Messina, Italy, in 2007 and 2011, respectively. He was a visiting PhD student at the University of Salamanca (Spain), and, later, a visiting researcher at the Bogazici University, Istanbul (Turkey), and at FORTH Hellas in Crete (Greece). From 2019 to 2021 he was Assistant Professor at the University of Messina.

His research interests include modelling of magnetic materials at nanoscale, spintronic applications, micromagnetics, novel approaches for computing. He has published more than 40 papers on international refereed journals. He also served in technical and organization committees of several international conferences and as reviewer of several IEEE, IOP, AIP and Nature journals.

He is member of IEEE Magnetics Society, treasurer of IEEE Magnetics Society Italy Chapter, co-founder member of IEEE Nanotechnology Council Technical Committee on Quantum, Neuromorphic and Unconventional Computing, member of the board of directors of the Italian Association of Magnetism, vice-president of Petaspin Association.

Bibliometric indicators

Web of Science: h-index 16 and > 663 citations; Scopus: h-index 16 and > 701 citations; Google scholar: h-index 18 and > 893 citations – update 18/03/2022.

Vito Puliafito has co-authored more than 40 papers published in prestigious international journals (IEEE, Nature group, APS, IOP, AIP, Elsevier).

Research activities

Research activity of Vito Puliafito has been focused on micromagnetic modeling of spintronic devices (spin-torque oscillators, modulators, detectors, magnetic random-access memory), with a recent interest in antiferromagnetic spintronics. In particular, he has been the main author in the work which introduced a micromagnetic approach for studying antiferromagnetic spin-Hall oscillators, with and without Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) (<i>V. Puliafito et al., Physical Review B 99, 024405, 2019</i>). He is co-author of several papers where he modeled DMI in spintronic devices and performed micromagnetic simulations to define DMI effects in those magnetic structures (<i>V. Puliafito et al., J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 49, 145001, 2016</i>, <i>A. Giordano, V. Puliafito, et al., Sci. Rep. 6, 36020, 2016</i>, to cite a few), which are relevant for the submitted proposal MetroSpin.

He has worked in international collaborations with several well-known institutes and scientists, such as Oakland University, USA (prof. Andrei Slavin), University of Gothenburg, Sweden (prof. Johan Akerman). He was a visiting student at the University of Salamanca, Spain (contact information: Prof. Luis Torres – luis@usal.es), visiting post-doc at the Bogazici University (contact information: Prof. Ozhan Ozatay – ozhan.ozatay@boun.edu.tr), visiting post-doc at the Foundation for Research and Technology FORTH Hellas in Crete, Greece (contact information: Prof. Stavros Komineas – komineas@uoc.gr).   

He has been an invited speaker in more than 10 conferences/workshops on magnetism and spintronics, including IEEE Advances in Magnetics 2018. He is referee for more than 10 international journals including Scientific Reports, Physical Review B, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics. He is member of the Editorial board of IEEE Magnetics Letters, Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials, and Associate Editor for IEEE Nanotechnology Magazine. He was managing Guest Editor for Physica B: Condensed Matter.

Dissemination activities

Vito Puliafito has more than 10 years experience in dissemination activities. He has organized as chair, co-chair or member of the scientific and organizing committees more than 5 well established conferences (Magnonics, Hysteresis modeling and micromagnetics (HMM), Advances in Magnetics (AIM), Conference of the Italian Association of Magnetism (MAGNET)). He was also co-organizer of more than 5 workshops in Messina and Bari.

He is also founding member and vice-president of the Petaspin association (www.petaspin.com) which main missions are to support scientific research in many fields of engineering and applied physics, particularly in the field of magnetism, and to disseminate scientific results through conferences and meetings, also organized in collaboration with other institutions and associations. Petaspin leads the organization of Trends in Magnetism conference series and has more than 12000 contacts of people working in magnetism and related field and has organized several events and virtual activities (https://www.petaspin.com/workshops-and-seminars-2022-home/). Vito Puliafito will be general co-chair of 2022 Trends in Magnetism conference, which will be held in Venice from 4 to 9 September 2022, and general co-chair of 2025 IEEE Advances in Magnetics Conference, which will be held in Bardonecchia, Italy.

Degree of success in previous Italian or international projects

Participation in the project PRIN (PRIN2010ECA8P3) entitled “Manipulation of magnetization dynamics in nanostructures for spintronic applications”, funded by MIUR Italy.

Scientific coordinator: Prof. Giovanni Finocchio

Role: In charge for the numerical analysis of the creation and dynamics of soliton modes in magnetic nano-devices for application in information engineering.

Participation in the Executive program of scientific and technological cooperation between Italy and China for the years 2016-2018 entitled “Nanoscale broadband spin-transfer-torque microwave detector” funded by Ministero degli Affari Esteri e Cooperazione Internazionale (MAECI) grant n.CN16GR09.

Scientific coordinators: Prof. Giovanni Finocchio and Prof.  Zhongming Zeng

Role: In charge for micromagnetic modeling and numerical simulations of the synchronization of microwave spintronic oscillators based on spin-Hall effect.

Participation in the project PRIN (PRIN2020LWPKH7) entitled “The Italian factory of micromagnetic modeling and spintronics”, funded by MIUR Italy.

Local Scientific coordinator: Prof. Mario Carpentieri

Role: In charge for the numerical analysis of spintronic sensors for information and biomedical applications.

Achievement of awards and other recognitions

Paper highlighted as particularly significant for scientific community, and selected for a post in the blog JPhys+ of IOP (https://jphysplus.iop.org/2016/05/13/reproducible-formation-of-single-magneticbubbles/), where the contribution and the biography have been reported.

“IEEE Magnetics Society Italy Chapter Young Researcher Award 2016”, given by the Italian Chapter of IEEE Magnetics Society, through an international board chaired by prof. Zhongming Zeng (Suzhou Institute of Nano-tech and Nano-bionics, China).

“Best poster award”, received for the paper “Electrical detection of single magnetic skyrmion at room temperature”, authors R. Tomasello, M. Ricci, P. Burrascano, V. Puliafito, M. Carpentieri, G. Finocchio, presented at the Conference MMM 2016.

Since 2019, official volunteer of IEEE Magnetics Society Italy Chapter, for which he is secretary/treasurer. In 2020 the chapter was awarded as “Best Chapter” from IEEE Italy section.

The paper “Spin-orbit torque based physical unclonable function”, published on Journal of Applied Physics in 2020, was highlighted as particularly significant, and was promoted by the publisher for a specific comment published on AIP Scilight (https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/10.0001615).