speaker

Steven Cowley

Plasma Physicist

Steven Cowley took on the role of Director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy and Chief Executive Officer of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority between 2008 and 2016. He received his BA from Oxford University and his PhD from Princeton University. Professor Cowley's post-doctoral work was at Culham and he returned to Princeton in 1987. He joined the faculty at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1993, rising to the rank of Full Professor in 2000. From 2001 to 2003 he led the plasma physics group at Imperial College, London, where he remained as a part-time professor until accepting the position of President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in October 2016. He became a member of the UK Prime Minister’s Council of Science and Technology in 2011 and in 2012 he was awarded the Glazebrook Medal of the Institute of Physics.

Francesco Tombesi

Astrophysicist

Francesco Tombesi is an astrophysicist at NASA/GSFC and assistant research scientist at the Department of Astronomy of the University of Maryland, College Park. His main research topic is the study of super-massive black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGN) through X-ray observations collected from orbiting satellites. In particular, he investigates the origin of black hole driven winds, such as the powerful ultra-fast outflows (UFOs), and their feedback on the AGN host galaxies. Dr. Tombesi is a member of the science teams of the upcoming large X-ray observatories ASTRO-H (launch date February 2016) and Athena (launch date in 2028). He has been awarded several prizes, among which the 2014 "Early Career Research Scientist Prize for Excellence” of the Dept. of Astronomy at the University of Maryland, College Park and the “2014 NASA Astrophysics Science Division Peer Award”.

The slides of the lecture can be found here.

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Roberto Vittori

Astronaut

Roberto Vittori graduated from the Italian Accademia Aeronautica in 1989 and then trained as a pilot in the United States. In 1998, Vittori was selected by the ESA to join the European Astronaut Corps. He participated in several spaceflights with the Russian Soyuz and he took part in the penultimate mission of the American Space Shuttle Program. He was the first European astronaut to visit the International Space Station (ISS) twice. He carried out numerous experiments in astrobiology and space physiology. He was the last non-American to fly aboard the Space Shuttle. He was decorated by Italy and Russia and he is a high-ranking officer of the Italian Air Force.

Francesco Prino

Particle Physicist

Francesco Prino is presently a researcher of the INFN Torino. From 2004 he has worked mainly on the preparation, the commissioning and the data analysis of the ALICE experiment at the LHC. Within the ALICE experiment he worked on the construction, test and performance studies of the silicon drift detectors (SDD) of the inner tracking system (ITS). He has been the project leader of the SDD detector since October 2008. He worked on the analysis of the data collected by the ALICE experiment to study the properties of the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), in particular, he contributed to the quest of the QGP by studying the production of particles with charm quarks (D mesons in ALICE and J/psi in NA50). He was the convener of the Heavy-Flavour working groups of the ALICE collaboration from January 2013 to December 2014 and he is presently serving as deputy coordinator of the Data Preparation Group of the ALICE experiment.

The slides of the lecture can be found here.

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James Kakalios

The Physics of Superheroes

James Kakalios is a physics professor at the University of Minnesota. Known within the scientific community for his work with amorphous semiconductors, granular materials, and 1/f noise, he is known to the general public as the author of the book The Physics of Superheroes, which considers comic book superheroes from the standpoint of fundamental physics.

Elena Aprile

Dark Matter

Elena Aprile is the founder and spokesperson of the XENON Dark Matter Experiment. She began working on liquid argon detectors as a graduate student at CERN, and later as postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University. At Columbia University in the City of New York she worked on the first liquid xenon Time Projection Chamber (LXeTPC) as a Compton telescope for MeV gamma rays. From 1996 to 2001, Aprile was spokesperson of the NASA sponsored Liquid Xenon Gamma-Ray Imaging Telescope (LXeGRIT) project. Since 2001, Aprile’s research focus shifted to dark matter direct detection with liquid xenon. She received several scientific awards like the National Science Foundation Career Award in 1991 and she has been a Fellow of the American Physical Society since 2000. In 2005 she received the medal of Ufficiale dell'Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana.

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Agnese Bissi

Theoretical Physicist

Agnese Bissi is a young prominent researcher in Theoretical Physics, currently member of the "Center for fundamental laws of nature" at Harvard University. She got her PhD in 2013 at Niels Bohr Institute, Copenaghen with a thesis on holographic correlation functions. Afterwards, she obtained a postdoctoral position in Oxford, where she spent two years before moving to Harvard. At the beginning of 2017 she won the prestigious "Wallenberg Academy Fellowship" which allows her to form her own young research group in Uppsala starting from next fall. Her research activity is mainly focused on theoretical high energy physics. In particular she made outstanding contributions to the application of the conformal bootstrap to correlation functions in higher dimensional Conformal Field Theories.

The slides of the lecture can be found here.

AISF

AISF is the Italian Association of Physics Students (Associazione Italiana Studenti di Fisica) and it gathers together all the Italian students of physics. It was founded in Heidelberg in August 2014 and since January 2015 is a National Committee for the International Association of Physics Students (IAPS). It counts currently 12 Local Committees and 900+ members. Numerous national and international events, such as CISF, iaps@GranSasso, LoT and PAPAP have altready been organized by AISF.

IAPS

IAPS is an association of physics students and student societies from around the globe, working to promote peaceful collaboration among them. Its members are represented by national and local committees, who meet regularly to ensure the relevance of its activities. There are 16 National Committees and 20 Local Committees of IAPS, representing and estimated total of 50000 students. Beside that, there are also individual members from other countries.