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News from ICTP 101 - Dateline
Hulme Appointed to Scientific Council
Mike Hulme, executive director of the Tyndall Centre
for Climate Change Research in Norwich, UK, has been appointed
to the ICTP Scientific Council. The Tyndall Centre is the main
institute in the UK responsible for assessing climate change impacts
and potential adaptation and mitigation strategies. The Centre,
for example, is responsible for preparing the UK climate change
report, the most comprehensive report on climate change in the
nation. Before arriving at the Tyndall Centre, Hulme was a professor
at the University of East Anglia, UK, where he headed the Climate
Research Unit. His primary areas of research focus on climatology
and climate change scenarios and impacts. Hulme has been a coordinating
lead author and member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) Working Group II, which examines climate change
impacts and adaptation. He is also a participant in the European
Climate Forum, a continent-wide initiative designed to discuss
and analyse climate change issues of critical importance to Europe.
Filippo Giorgi, head of the ICTP Physics of Weather and Climate group, has been elected one of six vice chairs of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group I. As a representative from the European region, Giorgi is one of approximately 30 scientists from around the world elected to the bureau. The IPCC is divided into three working groups. Working Group I is responsible for examining the scientific basis of climate change; Working Group II focusses on impacts of climate change and adaptation; and Working Group III concentrates on mitigation. IPCC publications are recognised as the world's most authoritative research reports on global climate change issues. The panel's efforts have received international attention and its findings have helped shape public policies and perceptions related to climate change issues. The next round of IPCC reports are scheduled to be published in 2007.
TREL
ICTP has established a Training and Research in European Laboratories
(TREL) Programme. Daniele Treleani, professor of physics
at Trieste University and long-time ICTP consultant, will be responsible
for the programme, which has been placed under the administrative
umbrella of ICTP's Office of External Activities. The roots of
this initiative reside in talks with Mohamed ElBaradei, director
general of IAEA, who visited ICTP in September 1999, and Philippe
Busquin, European Commissioner for Research and Technological
Development, who visited in March 2001.
Minella Alarcon (in the photo with Daniele Treleani),
UNESCO programme specialist for physics and mathematics, visited
ICTP from 23 to 26 April. She met with the heads of all research
groups and programmes and toured the computing facilities and
library. Alarcon was interested in laying the groundwork for future
additional collaboration with ICTP.
ICTP at Albuquerque
ICTP served as the focal point of discussion at the 21 April session
of the American Physical Society's annual meeting held in Albuquerque,
New Mexico, USA. Former ICTP director Miguel Virasoro and
Boris Kayser, visiting scientist at the Fermi National
Laboratory Accelerator's Theory Group, Batavia, Illinois, USA,
spoke on the role of ICTP in international science. Pervez
Hoodbhoy, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan, and
Arnulfo Zepeda, Centro de Investigación y de
Estudios Avanzados, Mexico City, Mexico, examined the role
of ICTP in South Asia and Latin America respectively.
In Science
Fullerenes, soccer ball-like molecules formed by carbon atoms, may hold the key for understanding the behaviour of high temperature superconducting materials. A new theoretical model examining unconventional superconductivity in fullerenes was presented in the 28 June issue of Science in "Strong Correlated Superconductivity," an article written by a team of Italian physicists from the National Institute for the Physics of Matter (INFM) that included Erio Tosatti, ICTP's acting director and professor of physics at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), and Michele Fabrizio, associate professor at SISSA and an ICTP consultant. Meanwhile, Science Express, the online edition of Science, has published a paper by ICTP staff scientist Riccardo Zecchina, along with Marc Mézard, University of Paris XI, and Giorgio Parisi, University of Rome La Sapienza, that proposes a new algorithmic strategy for 'hard problems' in computer science, computational biology, and the physics of disordered systems. The print version of the paper appeared in Science 297, 2 August 2002, pp. 812-815.
Faheem Hussain, head of ICTP's Office of External Activities,
attended a special ceremony at the University of Havana on 26
June commemorating the 40th anniversary of the university's physics
degree programme. The Centre was honoured for the contribution
it has made to the programme's development and success. ICTP and
the university have worked closely together since the mid 1960s.
Radicella Honoured
Sandro M. Radicella, head of ICTP's Aeronomy and Radiopropagation
Laboratory, has been awarded an honorary degree from the University
of Bucharest in Romania in appreciation of his contributions to
science and society. Radicella has played an instrumental role
in the building of cost-effective radiocommunication networks
in some of the South's poorest countries. His group is currently
working on the Galileo project, a European Union initiative designed
to establish an all-civilian system for satellite navigation.
The project is expected to be operational by 2008.
De La Cruz and Altshuler
Two frequent visitors to ICTP have been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. Francisco de La Cruz, researcher at Centro Atómico Bariloche and professor physics at Instituto Balseiro, Argentina, has been elected foreign associate for his contributions to the "phenomenology of traditional and new superconductors" and, in particular, "his studies of the physics of vortex matter in high-Tc superconductors." La Cruz has visited the Centre on numerous occasions, notably during the early 1990s when he served as director of the Experimental Workshop on High-Tc Superconductors and Related Activities.
Boris Altshuler, professor of physics at Princeton University and fellow at the NEC Research Institute, USA, was elected a member for being "one of the founders of the theory of mesoscopic systems." Altshuler has participated in no less than 15 ICTP activities dating back to 1988 and has served as course director of the workshops on mesoscopic systems since 1998.
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