Electric organ (biology) in research because of their resemblance to nerve-muscle junctions. The stack of electrocytes has long been compared to a voltaic pile, and may even have inspired the invention of the battery, since the analogy was already noted by Alessandro Volta. While the electric organ is structurally similar to a battery, its cycle of operation is more like a Marx generator, in that the individual elements are slowly charged in parallel, then suddenly and nearly simultaneously discharged in series to produce a high voltage pulse. To discharge the electrocytes at the correct time, the electric eel uses its pacemaker nucleus, a
Alessandro Vespignani Award for scientific research and collaboration between Italy and the United States for the research on the “Spatiotemporal spread of the 2014 outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Liberia and the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical intervention: a computational modelling analysis.” In 2017 Vespignani received the Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Alessandro Vespignani Alessandro Vespignani is an Italian-American physicist, best known for his work on complex networks, and particularly for work on the applications of network theory to the spread of disease, applications of computational epidemiology, and for studies of the topological properties of the