ISSNAF Interviews

Alessandro Marianantoni: From Commodore 64 to CO2morrow

Thursday, 21 January 2010 23:55
Alessandro Marianantoni is the creator, with Marcos Lutyens, of an impressive Sculpture — CO2morrow, an interactive art installation on climate change currently on the façade of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The sculpture is part of the art show — Earth: Art of A Changing World — that the RAA conceived as “a cultural partner” of the summit COP15, sponsored by the UK National Trust. CO2morrow stands like a visual “contrappunto” for the climate change debate. Alessandro Marianantoni earned a degree in Computer Science from the University of L'Aquila, with a thesis on perceptual interfaces developed at the USC Integrated Media System Center. A researcher since 2004 at the UCLA REMAP Center, School of Theater, Film and TV, Marianantoni has been in the US for seven years, always working with a strong multidisciplinary approach on projects that span a variety of different fields -- culture and cultural heritage; environment and health; visual and performing art -- always with a strong emphasis on technology.
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An Interview with Emanuela Barzi

Thursday, 05 November 2009 12:07
Emanuela Barzi is an engineer and physicist working in the cutting-edge field of Superconductivity at Fermilab near Chicago. Barzi grew up in Bruxelles (Belgium), received degrees at the University of Pisa, both in Engineering and Physics. She arrived at Fermilab in 1994 thanks to a fellowship of the Italian Department of Foreign Affairs that she received for her thesis in di-boson production at CDF (Collider Detector at Fermilab). Today Barzi runs her own research group at Fermilab, and has close to 150 peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals. She has just received the Fermilab Exceptional Performance Recognition Award (EPRA) for “her multi-year achievements in a very successful mentoring program for engineering students.” Barzi speaks several languages and is an accomplished, though she claims… “rusty,” pianist.
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An Interview with Pietro Musumeci – 2009 DOE Outstanding Junior Investigator (OJI)

Friday, 21 August 2009 00:00
Pietro Musumeci received a degree in physics, summa cum laude, from the University of Rome "La Sapienza", in 1998; won the Award "Enrico Persico" Academia Nazionale dei Lincei at age 21, and received both a Master of Science in Physics (1999) and a PhD (2004) at UCLA. His post-doc studies were at INFN, sez. Roma, in 2004-2005. After leading the herculean efforts of commissioning the first Italian photoinjector in 2005-2006 at the SPARC facility in Frascati, Musumeci now leads the UCLA PEGASUS laboratory experimental efforts, with the goal of building an advanced photoinjector facility suited to for basic beam research and ultrafast relativistic electron diffraction. Credited as a "natural teacher," Pietro Musumeci teaches at the UCLA's Department of Physics and Astronomy where he is an assistant professor. Pietro Musumeci's has just been nominated for a DOE 2009 Outstanding Junior Investigator Award (OJI) - an award which is designed to support exceptionally talented new high-energy physicists in their early career. It comes no surprise.
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Interview with Marisa Roberto - "The Queen of the Amygdala* ''

Saturday, 25 July 2009 00:00
Marisa Roberto is an associate professor at the Scripps Research Institute and a member of the Scripps Research Committee on the Neurobiology of Addictive Disorders, Pearson Center for Alcohol and Addiction Research, and the Harold L. Dorris Neurological Research Institute. Roberto received both her B.A. (1996) and her Ph.D. (2001) degrees in Biology from the University of Pisa. Her important studies in the field of addictive disorders are also the product of a rigorous methodology of research in which she was trained at Pisa. In the story she tells, both Pisa and Volterra - the place where she was formed as a scientist and the place of her birth - remain central in the journey that brought Marisa Roberto to the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on early career scientists - Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). * The amygdala is part of the basal forebrain and it's involved in emotional states
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Luca Dal Negro: Science and Poetry

Wednesday, 01 July 2009 22:35
Luca Dal Negro is a physicist working in the field of silicon-based nanophotonics and nanoplasmonics. He is the author of several breakthrough articles on the development of a silicon laser and continues to be involved in cutting edge developments. Luca also writes poetry: in Luca’s words, poetry is a mirror image of his scientific research. A collection of his poems was published in the 2000 – the same year his seminal article was published in Nature (''Optical Gain in Silicon Nanocrystals") - with the evocative title “Ostinate Solitudini”, Collana Poeti Italiani Contemporanei, Libro Italiano, Editrice Letteraria Internazionale, Ragusa, (Italy). Luca Dal Negro received a degree in physics, summa cum laude, in 1999 and in 2003 a Ph.D. in semiconductor physics, both from the University of Trento, in Italy. After joining MIT as a post doctoral associate, in 2006 he became Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University and a faculty member of the Photonics Center - Nanomaterials and Nanostructure Optics (NaNO) Lab.
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