Alexei Vazquez

Alexei Vazquez is a physicist who learned to read complex systems as networks. Trained in physics at the University of Havana and awarded a PhD in Statistical and Biological Physics from SISSA in Trieste, he first made his name in network science, illuminating how simple local rules of attachment give rise to the complex network architectures that we experience. He then turned that same structural intuition toward metabolism, treating the cell's web of reactions as a system whose topology and constraints govern how it grows and what it can become. His work on overflow metabolism—spanning yeast, bacteria, marathon runners, and tumors—reframed our understanding of metabolism through the lens of molecular crowding and flux limits. Over a decade he led a group at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute in Glasgow, pairing theory with experiment to uncover the fascinating world of formate metabolism. Today he carries that same science of interconnection into a new domain as a data scientist at Nodes & Links Ltd, where AI is used to model risk and delay across large-scale infrastructure and project-delivery networks—a fitting return to the study of how complexity propagates through any system, whether a cell or a construction project.