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News from ICTP 112 - Dateline
ICTP Director Meets India's President
ICTP director, K.R. Sreenivasan, met the President of India, Abdul
Kalam, at the President's home on 4 March to discuss the future
relationship between ICTP and India's scientific community. Issues
raised at the meeting included the role that ICTP could play in
improving the links between India's research centres and universities
and the prospects for additional joint ICTP-Indian scientific
activities that would take place in India and ICTP.
Medical Physics Award
The European Commission's Directorate General for Education and Culture has given the first-ever Leonardo da Vinci Award to the European Medical Imaging Technology (EMIT) Consortium for its pioneering e-learning materials on the use and applications of magnetic medical imaging and medical ultrasound scanning for the diagnosis of cancer, neurological, obstetric and cardiovascular diseases. ICTP is a member of EMIT, which is coordinated by King's College in the United Kingdom. The Centre has hosted several of the Consortium's activities, including a training session in November 2003 and a workshop in September 2004, where EMIT's e-learning materials were discussed and tested. The awards committee described the materials, currently used by hospitals and medical research institutions in 79 countries, as "unmatched in their innovation, breadth and depth." The official awards ceremony took place in Maastricht, The Netherlands, on 14 December at a summit attended by the European ministers of education.
Imaging Physics
Representatives from Elettra Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory,
the University of Trieste, the Italian National Institute of Nuclear
Physics (INFN), Monash University, Melbourne, and CSIRO, Australia's
national research agency, met on 11 February at ICTP to discuss
a proposal for the establishment of an International Consortium
for Advanced Imaging Physics (ICAIP). The Consortium would seek
to build an international collaborative framework for bringing
scientists together under the auspices of ICTP. It would also
incorporate the expertise of other local institutions, particularly
INFN, Elettra and the University of Trieste.
Einstein in Space
ICTP has resumed its public lecture series which began last year to celebrate ICTP's 40th anniversary. The new round of lectures has been dedicated to the World Year of Physics 2005. On 14 March, the date of Albert Einstein's birth, "Einstein in Space" was the subject of a public lecture by Ignazio Ciufolini, an associate professor of physics at the University of Lecce, Italy. Ciufolini spoke about his successful efforts to experimentally verify the anticipated effect of general relativity that he described in a 2004 article in Nature. Other lectures in this series will focus on teleportation and the search for life on Mars and Titan, Saturn's moon.
L'Oreal-UNESCO Award Winners 2005
The L'Oreal-UNESCO for Women in Science Award for 2005 has been given to five women scientists. This year's awards, which coincide with the World Year of Physics 2005, are devoted to material sciences. Of the five winners, three are well-known to ICTP:
-- Zohra Ben Lakhdar, Université de Tunis, Laboratoire de Physique Atomique Moleculaire, Tunis, Tunisia. Ben Lakhdar, who is an ICTP Associate, has participated in the colleges on optics since 1999.
-- Myriam Sarachik, City University of New York, USA. Sarachik spoke at the Third Stig Lundqvist Conference on Advancing Frontiers in Condensed Matter Physics and served on the Advisory Committee of the Tenth Hopping and Related Phenomena Conference (HRP 10) in 2003.
-- Fumiko Yonezawa, Keio University, Kawasaki, Japan. Yonezawa participated in the Conference on 'Wetting' in 1999.
The other L'Oreal-UNESCO 2005 winners are Belita Koiller, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Dominique Langevin, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France.
The L'Oreal-UNESCO for Women in Science Award, which was established in 1998, has become the world's most prestigious prize for women scientists. Each award carries a US$100,000 cash prize. The official awards ceremony took place at UNESCO headquarters in Paris on 3 March.
The Laureates of the 2005 L'Oreal-UNESCO Award for Women
in Science: (left to right) Zohra Ben Lakhdar, Fumiko Yonezawa,
Myriam P. Sarachik, Belita Koiller, and Dominique Langevin
(Photo: Jean-François de ROUBAIX/GAMMA)
Appointments and Honours
Giorgio Parisi, professor of theoretical physics at University "La Sapienza" in Rome, Italy, and winner of the ICTP Dirac Medal in 1999, has been awarded the 2005 Nonino Prize. The prize ceremony took place on 29 January at the estate of the Nonino family in Percoto near Udine, Italy. The Nonino family has been one of northern Italy's most successful wine growers for more than a century and the family has used its wealth and prestige to establish a series of prizes that recognise contributions of eminent authors, film makers, musicians, scientists and scholars to culture. Past winners of Nonino prizes include Nobel Laureates Rigoberta Menchu and V.S. Naipaul. For additional information, see www.nonino.it.
A trio of physicists with close ties to ICTP have been awarded the King Faisal International Prize for Science: Federico Capasso, Harvard University, lectured at ICTP condensed matter physics courses from 1984 to 1989; Frank Wilczek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA, won the ICTP Dirac Medal in 1994; and Anton Zeilinger, University of Vienna, Austria, was a course director for the Conference on Quantum Interferometry in 1993 and a speaker at the School and Workshop on Quantum Entanglement in 2004. The prize, sponsored by the King Faisal Foundation, carries a US$200,000 cash award, which the recipients will share.
John Hopfield, winner of the ICTP Dirac Medal in 2001, is the new vice president of the American Physical Society (APS). He assumed office on 1 January. Hopfield will become president-elect in 2006 and president in 2007.
Giuliano F. Panza, head of the Structure and Non-linear Dynamics of the Earth (SAND) group, has been appointed honorary professor of the Institute of Geophysics, China Earthquake Administration, Beijing. Panza has been chosen for his "outstanding contribution to seismology, especially in the fields of earthquake hazard and strong ground motion as well as intermediate-term earthquake forecasting." The award ceremony will take place in Beijing on 23 July.
Karl-Goran Maler, professor of economics at the Stockholm School of Economics and director of The Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics in Sweden, and co-organiser of the ecological and environmental economics research and training activity at ICTP, will receive a lifetime achievement award from the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (EAERE). Mäler will share the award with David Pearce, professor of economics at University College London, UK. The award is given to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to scholarship, institutional development and the communication and dissemination of ideas.
Charles Townes, who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1964 for his work in quantum electronics that led to the construction of the first lasers, has been named the winner of the $1.5 million Templeton Prize. The announcement took place at a press conference at the United Nations headquarters on 9 March. The Templeton Prize, which was established in 1972 by the inventor and philanthropist Sir John Templeton, is awarded annually to those pursuing and writing about spiritual matters. Previous winners include Mother Teresa (who was awarded the first Templeton Prize in 1973), Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and scientists Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Paul Davies, Freeman Dyson, and George F.R. Ellis (last year. See "Going Home," News from ICTP, Winter 2003-2004, p. 14). Townes, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, visited ICTP in 1968 and 1972. As The New York Times recently noted, Townes, 89, "has long argued that those old antagonists science and religion are more alike than different and are destined to merge."
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