Rosario N. Mantegna is professor at Palermo University and at Central European University. His research concerns interdisciplinary applications of statistical physics and network science. He started to work in the area of the analysis and modeling of social and economic systems with tools and concepts of statistical physics in 1990 and he is one of the pioneers in the fields of econophysics and network filtering. He coauthored the first book on econophysics and published the first paper on similarity based networks. In 1999 he founded the Observatory of Complex Systems of Palermo University.