Education Officer
Born in 1991 in Salerno, Italy, with an inherited macular degeneration, Michele Mele obtained a master degree in Mathematics from the University of Salerno and a PhD in Mathematics at the University of Naples ‘Federico II’. He currently works as research fellow at the University of Sannio in Benevento, designing models and algorithms to solve Combinatorial Optimization problems, often related to accessibility and service scheduling. One of his main research interests, and the focus of his PhD program, was the scheduling of assistance services for passengers with special needs in large-scale airports, a problem that he first modelled and solved respecting all the real world inspired constraints that such services have to comply with. In January 2021, he released “L’Universo tra le Dita”, an essay collecting the stories of ten blind or partially sighted scientists that lived throughout the centuries, and in 2017 founded, and still coordinates, the first Italian project to create tactile reproductions of bidimensional artworks for blind and partially sighted people. He also collaborates with a number of journals and websites on other subjects, the most renowned of these is the British folk music related website Bright young Folk.
