About
Fabio Anza finished his bachelor’s in physics at the University of Palermo, Italy in 2010. He then moved to Pisa to pursue his Master's in Theoretical Physics, which he earned in 2014. He earned a PhD in Theoretical Physics in 2018 at the University of Oxford with a thesis on foundational aspects of physics: statistical mechanics and quantum gravity. Between 2018 and 2021, he was Templeton Independent Research Fellow at the Complexity Science Center, University of California, Davis. In 2021, he was hired as a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Washington. Between 2022 and 2023, he moved back to Italy and took a 1-year career break to support his wife. At that time, he co-founded Kernel Science, a company that builds services for researchers and academics.In August 2024 he joined the University of Maryland, Baltimore County as tenure track Assistant Professor.
Research interests
Fabio Anza's research lies at the interface of physics and information theory, spanning both classical and quantum domains. His current focus is on two theoretical frontiers: Complex Quantum Systems — encompassing many-body, out-of-equilibrium, open quantum systems interacting with highly structured environments — and AI and Formal Methods for Science — building infrastructure to transform how theoretical science is conducted, communicated, and verified.Complex Quantum Systems
His work in this area advances along four active research directions:
Natural Computation
Complex Quantum Systems undergoing their natural dynamics can store and process information. Understanding, modeling, and exploiting these information-processing capabilities represents a formidable challenge at the intersection of Complexity Science, Information Theory, and Quantum Physics.
Geometric Quantum Mechanics
The Hilbert space formulation of Quantum Mechanics, grounded in Linear Algebra, is known to be redundant. Geometric Quantum Mechanics (GQM) offers an alternative, physically equivalent approach. Founded on Differential Geometry and Dynamical Systems theory, GQM provides an entirely new set of tools and conceptual frameworks that can advance our understanding of quantum systems and their dynamics. While originally formulated for isolated quantum systems, Anza is extending its boundaries to include out-of-equilibrium open quantum systems.
Foundations of Quantum Mechanics
If nature undergoes unitary quantum dynamics at the most fundamental level, how does classicality emerge within a quantum universe? Quantum Darwinism and decoherence theory provide information-theoretic mechanisms to understand the classical-to-quantum transition. However, many questions remain unanswered: Which models support the emergence of classicality? On what time scales? How can this approach extend to quantum field theory and gauge theories?
Beyond the emergence of classicality, Anza investigates how classical and quantum statistical mechanics, with their inherent irreversibility, arise from underlying coherent dynamics. Grounded in Observable Statistical Mechanics, his information-theoretic approach provides concrete answers, which he is developing into a comprehensive theoretical framework.
Quantum Gravity
While general relativity offers the best theoretical framework to describe gravity, it fails to account for the quantum properties of the gravitational field. Exploiting the notion of quantum geometry from spin-networks and Loop Quantum Gravity, along with the known thermal properties of the gravitational field, Anza pursues a hypothesis of "Thermodynamic emergence of spacetime." This proposes that classical gravity is not quantum gravity's semiclassical limit but rather its thermodynamic limit. His work employs cutting-edge tools from quantum information theory and quantum thermodynamics to test this hypothesis and identify potential experimental verifications.
AI and Formal Methods for Science
His work in this area advances along two complementary directions:
Agentic AI for Scientific Reasoning — Modern AI systems can do more than assist with individual tasks; they can orchestrate entire scientific workflows. Anza is developing multi-agent AI architectures that integrate literature navigation, symbolic computation, numerical simulation, and formal verification into unified pipelines for physics research. His Amazon-funded Physics Co-Pilot project exemplifies this vision: an agentic system capable of autonomously navigating the scientific literature, identifying relevant results, and coordinating simulation workflows to accelerate discovery in quantum and statistical physics.
Formal Verification and Machine-Checkable Physics — The theoretical physics literature rests on informal mathematical reasoning that is difficult to audit, reproduce, or extend systematically. Anza is pursuing the formalization of core physics — including thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics — in the Lean 4 proof assistant. By encoding physical axioms, definitions, and theorems in a machine-checkable language, this program aims to create a reliable, composable foundation for theoretical physics. More broadly, Anza envisions a transition from the traditional journal-based publication model toward a community-maintained, version-controlled library of formally verified scientific knowledge, where contributions are modular, citable, and continuously refined.
Teaching interests
Fabio Anza's teaching interests focus on using statistical and information-theoretic methods to study classical and quantum complex systems. These range from mathematical methods in physics to quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, general relativity, information theory, complexity science, numerical methods, Artificial Intelligence.Education
- Postdoc — University of Trieste (2024)
- Postdoc — University of California, Davis (2021)
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Ph D
— University of Oxford (2018) Pure states statistical mechanics: On its foundations and applications to quantum gravity
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MS, Theoretical Physics
— University of Pisa (2014) LOOP GRAVITY, TWISTED GEOMETRIES AND TORSION
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BS, Physics
— University of Palermo (2010) Tripartite thermal correlations in a inhomogeneous spin-star system