#1. “Mathematics was never enough for me”
Interdisciplinary research is on everyone's lips. Yet, Italian interdisciplinary researchers like Roberta Sirovich struggle to find their place
To some mathematicians, mathematics’ distance from reality is a coveted quality. Abstraction and elegance speak directly to them. To others, it leaves an intellectual itch that can’t quite be scratched by mathematics itself. Roberta Sirovich sits firmly amongst the latter. A researcher at the University of Torino, a Northern Italian metropolis tucked away in the Alps, Sirovich works at the interface of mathematics and biology and medicine. Her research seeks to understand biomedical phenomena, like tumour growth, through the lenses of stochastic processes, mathematical objects that evolve randomly over time.
“Mathematics was never enough for me,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy reading good mathematics immensely. But as an abstract exercise in style, I don’t find it satisfactory.” Her need for something more goes back a long way. Always the disciplined student, she also calls herself an anarchist on the inside: her interests and passions were so varied that, come the time to choose a university degree, she struggled a lot. Ultimately, the choice of mathematics was both “irrational and unreasonable”. “I made a purely hedonistic choice, pursuing a degree in what I enjoyed the most.”
Her love of mathematics never waved. But the study of mathematics for its own sake left her unsatisfied. “For me, it was always a matter of finding meaning in what I was doing. And I couldn’t think of spending my career on something that didn’t have a clear impact.” This push led her to applied mathematics, at the intersection of mathematics with other natural sciences. The choice of biology and medicine was obvious, back then. “Compared to other subjects, [biology and medicine] had and still have an urgent need for mathematicians and complicated mathematics,” she explains. “Other subjects, like economics or engineering, both have mathematicians working in them and a good education in mathematics for their researchers. The same cannot be said for biology and medicine, especially in Italy.”
Sirovich started her career with a PhD between Torino, at the Mathematics department, and Grenoble, where she was affiliated with the Molecular Biology department. “While in France, I was part of a lab, together with biologists and other scientists that conducted actual experiments. I witnessed first-hand what interdisciplinary research was about.” She came back to Italy to find an entirely different system, with dire consequences for its research output. The Italian system forces mathematicians and natural scientists to be separated: in most universities, the former will be affiliated with the mathematics department and enlisted in one of nine settori scientifico-disciplinari (SSD), which strictly divide researchers based on their subfield of research. The latter will be housed in biology departments, for example, and subjected to a similar classification system. None of the mathematics SSDs explicitly include applied mathematics, even though four of them (probability and statistics, numerical analysis, mathematical physics, and operational research) are traditionally dubbed settori applicati. The one closest to Sirovich’s work, MAT/06, collects researchers working in probability and statistics. But in the almost twenty years since her PhD, “the SSD has turned more and more theoretical, with little space left for applied work,” she said. A process with a detrimental impact on the career of interdisciplinary and applied researchers, Sirovich included.
Up until a very recent reform1, becoming a university professor in Italy meant obtaining the so-called Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale (ASN), a process that - despite the name - was quite different from the German Habilitation. Researchers looking for a habilitation used to submit their resumé and publications, together with the request to obtain the habilitation for a certain Settore Concorsuale, a piece of yet another classification system, slightly coarser than the SSD one. The Settore Concorsuale determined what kind of professor positions they could apply for, if they were successful - to become a professor in MAT/06, probability and statistics, one would have needed to obtain the ASN in Settore Concorsuale 01/A3, which includes mathematical analysis as well. The applications were judged by committees of professors from all over the country, and habilitations were awarded based on merit and experience. For researchers fitting in the more classical subfields of mathematics, like algebra or numerical analysis, the ASN was a cumbersome but straightforward procedure. Applied researchers, however, often faced a built-in barrier.
“They will tell you, ‘Well, you’re good, but your work is outside of the Settore’,” explains Sirovich. As her original subfield shifted towards the more and more theoretical, she found herself without a box to fit into. And alongside her, all the researchers working between different subjects, bringing to life fruitful applications of hard mathematics to tough biological or medical problems. A vicious cycle: “It is also a problem of representation. If applied mathematicians can’t get professor positions, they are excluded from the decision-making.” Without the right voices sitting at the table, nobody seems to be interested in raising the issue, and the situation cannot improve.
With this strict separation of subjects and careers, there is both a cultural and administrative obstruction to interdisciplinary work. Collaborations need to extend between different departments, with different sources of funding and physical places where the work is done. These issues might seem trivial at first, but they add up. As a consequence, ‘applied’ mathematics in Italy is very theoretical. In Sirovich’s words, it is ultimately mathematics for its own sake, building models that have nothing to do with the real processes. “I distinctly remember the first time I saw the measurement of a neuron’s membrane potential. I thought to myself, ‘All the mathematical models I have been taught in the past three years are just wrong, they have nothing to do with this’.” She felt a sense of disheartenment. “I told myself, ‘That’s not how I want to work’.”
Interdisciplinary research goes against this idea of what mathematics should be about. “Being an applied mathematician means working in service of the science, in service of the phenomenon whose data you handle and use,” says Sirovich.“It cannot be mathematics for its own sake, you have to give up this ideal. Being an applied mathematician forces you to constantly check yourself against reality, against the real process that you are trying to model. This is why they call you ‘outside of the Settore’,” she complains.
The impact of such a strict classification of scientific research and knowledge extends beyond applied research. In 2024, the SSD and Settori Concorsuali system underwent an essentially cosmetic reform, initiated in 2018 by the then Minister for Education, University and Research Valeria Fedeli. In February 2021, the newly appointed Minister Messa confirmed the need for such a reform, which in turn was suddenly accelerated from 2023 onwards by the reform of temporary academic positions. Mathematics was one of the subjects at the core of the discussions, which involved both professors and members of the professional association for mathematicians (UMI). But the structure was essentially left untouched.
More and more issues have been coming up in recent years because of the severe underfunding that Italian research is going through. In 2024 alone, the Fondo di finanziamento ordinario - the standard funding stream from the government to universities - was cut by 200 million euros. Sirovich offers a medical metaphor: “When there was money, problems were harder to see, but when money is cut short, you are suddenly seeing an X-ray of the system, you see its skeleton, and all deformations come to light.” As the academic job market becomes more and more precarious, researchers who don’t fit into the precise categories inscribed in the law face an even worse fate. Even when internationally recognised, they struggle to find a stable job back in Italy, or even when they do find one - like in Sirovich’s case - they are blocked from career progressions.
In Sirovich’s ideal world, applied mathematicians would have their own home in mathematics departments. “Currently, the only place that comfortably hosts this kind of applied research is computer science, because of its history with computational work in genomics,” she explains, “but I am a mathematician.” And mathematicians are deeply needed, she argues: more and more, the data and models required to understand biological or medical phenomena are so complex that very advanced mathematics must come into the picture. The kind that requires an extensive theoretical background before one can even come to the applications. “There is a kind of applied work that can only be done by mathematicians, because the mathematical objects involved are too complicated to be handled by researchers with a different education.” And these mathematicians need a room of their own.
They also need a cultural shift. “We need to recognise that there is dignity in applied, interdisciplinary research,” points out Sirovich, “even before that, we need to recognise - and I mean economically speaking - that there is dignity in research at all”. Even though there is a lot of funding that bears the word interdisciplinary, at least at face value, the underlying political and cultural ideas haven’t changed. “Mathematicians who do theoretical work feel unappreciated because all grants are for applied research. On the other side, applied researchers are systematically and systemically excluded from careers and positions. Nobody wins.”
The recent reform abolished the ASN, implementing a system of thresholds and requirements in each specific hiring procedure instead of a general one. According to early commentary from Italian academics, the issues are just shifted around, not solved.