Acting director Erio Tosatti outlines his goals for his brief 10-month tenure, which will end in March with the arrival of Katepalli R. Sreenivasan.

A Bridge Between

Erio Tosatti

Between Miguel Virasoro's retirement last May and the arrival of ICTP's new director, Katepalli R. Sreenivasan, this coming March, the Centre finds itself in a state of transition.
As the person who has been called--coaxed might be a better word--to stand at the helm of ICTP during this transition, I have felt a bit like a flimsy bridge perched across two massive tectonic plates.
Sure enough, there is no deadly crevice beneath us--no immediate cause for apprehension. Virasoro left ICTP in excellent shape.
New in-house research groups in the physics of weather and climate and in statistical mechanics are flourishing. So are the capabilities of ICTP to meet its training mission in these new critical areas as well as in our more traditional disciplines.
Funding is in good shape, thanks mainly to the support of the Italian government, which has been both generous and foresightful in its policy towards developing countries and, more specifically, in providing young scientists from the South with broad opportunities to pursue their research interests with the resources and dignity that they deserve.
ICTP's infrastructure has been expanded and refurbished. Extensive renovations in the Adriatico Guesthouse have given the Centre ample new lecture rooms. The computerisation of administrative services is now complete and a new state-of-the-art system will soon be in operation allowing all lecture material from ICTP's training sessions to be placed directly on the web.
A dozen new scientific staff posts were recently opened and widely advertised for selecting not just the best brains available worldwide but the most motivated and giving among them--and several of these posts have already been filled. New scientific staff should boost our relevance and improve our ability to help developing world scientists even more.
Meanwhile, the Centre's staff continue to perform their tasks in quiet efficiency, enabling ICTP to carry on its many training and research activities as smoothly as a well-oiled machine.
All of these factors have helped to create an institution that many others envy. More importantly, these elements provide a very solid tectonic plate on which to face the future.
So, where do the fault lines lie? What are the gaps that an acting director must straddle until the next full-fledged director--the next tectonic plate--arrives?
Not surprisingly, despite all the good things, there are some troubled waters to bridge and gnawing gaps to fill. There are indeed important things to do that should not wait.
Here are a few immediate priorities that have stood in front of me and that I have tried to broach during my brief tenure.
The first is to refresh and revitalise contacts with the three parties that oversee the Centre: the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the Italian government.
UNESCO provides the framework for nearly all our administrative functions. Because it is neither a scientific nor an academic institution, it must literally stretch its rules to accommodate some of our unusual procedures. The Centre, in turn, must stretch to fit into UNESCO's rules as best it can, while still being able to function well.
These simultaneous stretching exercises have become more synchronised with the welcome visit to ICTP of UNESCO's head of human resources management, Dyane Dufresne-Klaus. On the science and training side, we are now opening new channels of co-operation with UNESCO's natural sciences sector, headed by Walter Erdelen, most notably through contacts with Maciej Nalecz and Minella Alarcon in the basic sciences programmes.
Relations with IAEA, the Centre's alma mater until 1996, which have always been close, are becoming still closer, due to many joint training activities now taking place at ICTP. I have met with Werner Burkart and Hadj Slimane Cherif of IAEA at the Centre and attended the Agency's General Conference this September in Vienna to discuss additional avenues of cooperation.
The Italian government, the third party in the tripartite agreement that guides ICTP, has been kept well informed of our initiatives through continual contact with Nicola Cabibbo, the government's liaison with the Centre, as well as through frequent discussions with Aniello Izzo and Gioacchino Fonti, representatives of the government's research and treasury ministries, together with counsellor Enrico Vicendi.
Italy, however, also deserves to be informed of what ICTP is doing, within the Centre's mandate, that may be of real or potential value to the country. Francesco Caruso, Italy's ambassador to UNESCO; Claudio Moreno, Italy's ambassador to IAEA; and Francesco Aloisi de Larderel, director general, Department of Cultural Promotion and Cooperation of Italy's Foreign Ministry, have been kept abreast of our initiatives and invited to ICTP. A recent visit by Harald Kreid, director general, Central European Initiative (CEI), also provided an opportunity to raise relevant issues concerning the Centre's relationship with its host country and major funder.
We should intensify informal as well as formal contacts and, in fact, do everything we can to make our activities more visible to the public: in Trieste, the city that so graciously hosts us; in Italy, the country that so generously funds us; and throughout the world so that we may more effectively attract young, still unknown scientists in the South striving in isolation, to whom we could lend a helpful hand if only we knew of each other's existence.
That is why I believe our celebration of UN Day in October was such an important event. It helped us to re-establish our ties with local Italian officials and, at the same time, gave us an opportunity to tell our story to a larger public, including national government leaders, through the media.
I would also like to hand over to our new director an institution that enjoys a greater sense of unity. More unity can be achieved by examining decisions together before making them, delegating more effectively, and informing staff about what is to come, good or bad, so that new things will not be perceived, as so often happens when one neglects to inform, as being imposed from above.
Finally, I should like to do something for science at ICTP. After all I am--and will always remain--a scientist.
Ever since I came to Miramare a quarter of a century ago, ICTP has been a good, sometimes excellent, place for analytical theoretical physics--science done with paper and pencil. But it has always been a lesser place for computational theoretical physics--science that needs computers and supercomputers to crunch numbers.
The reason for this disparity goes back to the founding of ICTP by Abdus Salam and Paolo Budinich: both elementary particles physicists who pursued abstract questions and theories that did not require computers for their work. That Roberto Car and Michele Parrinello invented here their celebrated computational method, struggling in 1984 with the terribly inadequate machines that ICTP provided them with at the time, is merely a tribute to their ingenuity.
Today ICTP does have computers but not of the type, power, and speed needed to conduct serious computational physics. Even colleagues from the Third World grin when they note the superiority of their facilities at home. Because ICTP is now developing strong computational research lines in condensed matter physics and in the physics of weather and climate, we have decided to take an important step in remedying this computational deficit by acquiring in-house supercomputer facilities.
The other thing I am doing for science at ICTP is to oversee, as carefully as I can, the recruitment of new young staff scientists.
A restaurant is only as good as its cooks; a scientific institution is only as good as the people it can attract. If ICTP were to become a haven for second-class scientists, it would seriously erode its standing within the global scientific community and, consequently, its ability to attract the best scientists from both the North and South, who meet and collaborate here.
The thrill of being able to do creative science is a real possibility for every young man or woman with talent. But for that possibility to become a reality, first-class teachers and mentors are essential.
Recruitment of talented young scientists with great potential for future accomplishments and with a gift for giving is what I am striving for in filling ICTP's new scientific posts. I believe such efforts will help advance the ideals of the Centre's founders, Abdus Salam and Paolo Budinich. Le Dung Trang, Marcelo Osvaldo Magnasco, Matteo Marsili and Sandro Scandolo, who have all been hired during the past six months, represent critical steps for ensuring a brighter future for the Centre.
I can think of no better way of serving as a sturdy bridge between Miguel Virasoro, who left in May, and Katepalli R. Sreenivasan, who will arrive in March.

Erio Tosatti
ICTP Acting Director

ICTP APPOINTS NEW DIRECTOR

Katepalli R. Sreenivasan, born in India and now a citizen of the United States, has been appointed the new director of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics. The announcement was made by Walter Erdelen, UNESCO Assistant Director General for Natural Sciences, at the ICTP Scientific Council in Trieste, Italy, on 4 November.
Sreenivasan is a world renowned experimental physicist whose major fields of interest are fluid dynamics and turbulence. He is currently a professor of physics and mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland in the United States, where he also directs the Institute for Physical Science and Technology.
Sreenivasan, 55, received his education in India, first at the University of Bangalore and subsequently at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, where he earned a doctorate in aerospace engineering in 1975. Following two years of post doctoral study in Sydney and Newcastle, Australia, he travelled to the United States to serve as a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and then at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where he was the Harold W. Cheel professor of mechanical engineering and professor of physics, applied physics and mathematics. He moved to the University of Maryland last January.
Sreenivasan has numerous publications to his credit in such fields as turbulence, complex fluids, combustion, cryogenic helium and nonlinear dynamics. He is scheduled to begin his tenure at ICTP in March next year.

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