Faculty Profile: Carlo Cafaro

He may have spent the bulk of his life in Italy, but his birthplace of Albany, N.Y. is where Dr. Carlo Cafaro has returned to and found his calling as an adult.

With his main fields of interest being General Relativity, Statistical Physics, Information Physics, and Quantum Computing, Dr. Cafaro is a theoretical physicist with a great passion for the mathematical details of any theoretical framework. And those interests are certainly nothing new. He says when it comes to theoretical physics and mathematics, he’s been intrigued since the tender age of five years old.

“I just like it.”

He moved to Italy with his Italian parents at age seven, where he lived for the next 20 years, studying at University of Pisa, earning an M.S. in Theoretical Physics before returning to the United States where he earned his PhD in Physics at the University of Albany.

“I must confess that despite some of the terminology that may appear hard, I really think that common sense and reasoning is a very powerful and general tool in science, except for quantum mechanics, I would say.”

On top of his time studying at the University of Pisa in Italy and the University of Albany, Dr. Cafaro has had postdoctoral experiences at the University of Camerino in Italy, the Max-Planck Institute for the Science of Light and Johannes Guttenberg University in Germany, as well as Clarkson University in the USA.

Despite the incredible experiences he’s had across the globe, he says he couldn’t be happier than where he is now.

“SUNY Poly, it’s the place to be. Research, development, teaching. They are all there. It is a unique place to be,” he says. “My work experiences in diverse countries and in diverse departments (physics, mathematics, computer science) allows me to bring a broad range of knowledge and scientific imagination into the classroom. I like making connections between different fields and I like having a big unifying picture of things. This is my peculiarity, I would say.”

While he’s been doing active research the past six years, he hasn’t shied away from teaching as well.

“Teaching is a very difficult task, in my opinion. I like to teach because I like to describe and understand things and explain them to people in a very clear manner. Doing research, this is not always possible. I believe simply because we do not fully understand what we are doing. It takes time. We teach things that once were the object of research.”

As a lecturer at SUNY Poly’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, Dr. Cafaro hopes his students find a general method of studying and tackling problems.

“They will forget the details, but it is important that they keep the method. This is my challenge,” he says. “I would like to be a great teacher, hopefully collaborate with students on a few projects. As a researcher, I hope to contribute with non-trivial findings that can be appreciated at an international level.”

He’s not just busy in the lab and in the classroom, he’s active behind the keyboard as well, having co-authored more than 40 refereed articles on international journals such as Physical Review, Physics Letters, modern Physics Letters, Physica, Chaos, International Journal of Theoretical Physics, and Applied Mathematics & Computation.

“In particular, my article with S. A. Ali, The spacetime algebra approach to massive classical electrodynamics with magnetic monopolies, is one of the Top Cited Articles of All Times in the Mathematical Physics archive hosted by Cornell University. I also had the honor to be invited to present my work on “The Information Geometry of Chaos” in Erice (in Sicily, Italy) at the prestigious Ettore Majorana Center in November 2007.”

Amid all this, he also finds time for enjoying long walks, playing pool, indoor soccer and one of his favorites – cooking for friends.

“My Italian side shows up when I cook.”