The 2004 Dirac Medal Awards Ceremony in honour of James D. Bjorken (professor emeritus of physics, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, SLAC) and Curtis G. Callan (professor of physics, Department of Physics, Princeton University) will be held on Wednesday, March 16, 2005 at 11.00 in the Main Lecture Hall of the Main Building. The public is invited to attend. The schedule is as follows:

11.00 Welcome address by K.R. Sreenivasan, ICTP Director
11.30 Dirac Lecture by James D. Bjorken
Scaling the Heights
12.15 Dirac Lecture by Curtis G. Callan
From Scaling to Asymptotic Freedom and Beyond: Quantum Field Theory and the Struggle to Understand the Strong Interaction

The work of Bjorken and Callan was instrumental in the theoretical developments of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s that led to the use of deep inelastic scattering for the elucidation of the nature of the strong interactions.
Bjorken was the first to realize the importance of deep inelastic scattering and understood the ("Bjorken") scaling of the cross sections. He made crucial contributions to the phenomenology of these and other experiments.
Callan (along with Symanzik, who is unfortunately now deceased) reinvented the perturbative renormalization group (the “Callan-Symanzik” equations) and understood them as measures of scale invariance anomalies. He applied these techniques to the analysis of deep inelastic scattering and made substantial contributions to particle physics including, more recently, to string theory.