Cosmopolitan defines Mario Barbatti. Don’t let the Italian-sounding name deceives you. Born and bred in Brazil, in the last sixteen years, he and his wife, Carla, have lived and worked in Austria, Netherlands, Germany, and France, as well as visited three dozen countries. Mario Barbatti is a renowned scientist. He earned a Ph.D. in physics in 2001, and since 2015, he is a professor of theoretical chemistry in the University of Aix Marseille in France. He has published over 150 papers in prestigious scientific journals, which have been cited over four thousand timed by his peers. In 2019, Mario Barbatti was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant, the most prestigious and competitive research funding in the European Union. “One Billion Faces” is Barbatti’s first incursion in the fictional realm. The stories composing this book span a wild variety of topics and styles, to contemplate our role in the universe, often from an unexpected entanglement of fantastic realism and hard science fiction.
