Trieste Città della Scienza
Trieste is a little gem at the top north east corner of the Adriatic Sea. Well known and appreciated for its Austro-Hungarian and mittle-eureopean memories, it is instead strongly projected into the future.
Trieste hosts about 30 different scientific institutions, and a huge portion of its people (37 every 1000) are scientists, or work in a scientific institution. No other place on earth can deploy such a concentration of beautiful minds.
It is the consequence of the peculiar situation that Trieste faced at the end of the WW2. Claimed by Jugoslavia, but returned to Italy after the Osimo treaty, Trieste, once the biggest port and vibrant trade capital of the Austro-hungarian Empire, found itself surrounded by an Iron Curtain.
However, what represented a strong limitation to trade activities was also an opportunity for diplomacy, more precisely, science diplomacy. Indeed, Marshal Tito kept a certain distance to USSR during the cold war, and the border behind Trieste remained, to a certain extent, open.
The real turning point in the scientific field came in 1961 with the meeting between Professor Paolo Budinich and the promising Pakistani physicist, future Nobel prize recipient, Abdus Salam, who proposed to the International Atomic Energy Agency the establishment of an international physics center that would allow scientists from all over the world to collaborate, with headquarters in Trieste. Three years later, in 1964 the International Centre for Theoretical Physics was born.
Now the Iron Curtain is a fading memory, although the name “TITO” written with white stones on the hill above the Synchrotron is still there to remind us, but the vocation of Trieste for the science is stronger than ever, and on the last week of September every year the main square of the city, Piazza Unità, hosts what is probably the largest science festival in world.
Elena Magnano, is a physicists and expert in synchrotron radiation applications. She graduated in physics at the University of Genoa and got a PhD from ETH Zurich. She performed experiments at the synchrotrons of Paris, Grenoble, Berlin, Lund, Brookheaven, Berkeley and Melbourne. She has worked in Berkeley, Boulder and Johannesburg, and she now a visiting scholar at the University of Sydney.
In Trieste she coordinates the synchrotron beam line Bach, where she applies synchrotron radiation to study the chemical reactions at the interface between liquid and solid phase and to investigate the effect of high energy radiation on material for space applications.
Marco Lazzarino is a material scientist, nanotechnologist and biophysicist. He graduated at the University of Genoa and got a PhD from the University of Groningen. He worked at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, at Princeton, at the Molecular Foundry in Berkeley and the Anschutz Medical school in Denver. His more recent research was focused in the application of nanotechnologies to investigate the role of forces on cells and on living organisms. At present he is seconded at the Embassy of Italy in Canberra where he works on science diplomacy.
The event will be held in English
Booking HERE