SISSA dedicates its Main Lecture Hall to Paolo Budinich
The School pays tribute to its recently deceased founder
On May 6, the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste will be paying tribute to the physicist and SISSA founder Paolo Budinich, who died last November, by dedicating the School’s Main Lecture Hall to him. The ceremony will take place at 12 noon. “Paolo Budinich’s contribution to our School and to the entire ‘Trieste City of Science’ project is inestimable. Dedicating SISSA Main Lecture Hall to Budinich was not just something that we owed to him but also a deeply felt decision”: with these words Guido Martinelli, Director of SISSA, announced the decision to name the Main Lecture Hall, the most important space of SISSA, after Paolo Budinich.
The decision had already been made just a few days after Budinich’s death, but now it will finally be made official: on May 6, at midday, a ceremony will be held in the presence of Budinich’s family and the authorities. The event will start with the projection of a film from the RAI archives showing Budinich being interviewed by journalist Fabio Pagan in 1989. The interview was an opportunity to trace the personal history of this important figure, his contributions to the creation
of many research centres in the Trieste area, and to explain, through the words of its founder, the origin and function of SISSA.
The interview will be followed by a short speech by Guido Martinelli, who will then go on to uncover a plaque dedicated to Budinich.
More in detail...
Trieste “City of Science” owes much, if not everything, to Paolo Budinich, who died on November 14, 2013. Budinich was an innovator, and without him we would never have had the “Trieste System”, an internationally renowned science centre and an “approach” to the management of scientific research which put Trieste at the leading edge of scientific research making it an example at the international level.
The Trieste System has also supported scientific education in developing countries by welcoming, over the past 50 years, thousands of young students from all over the world, like many of those who are attending SISSA today, so they could take the knowledge acquired back to their countries of origin.
In 1964, together with the Pakistani Nobel prize, Abdus Salam, Budinich founded the International Centre for Theoretical Physics ICTP of Miramare, the first block of Trieste City of Science. In 1978 he founded and became the first director of SISSA, the first school in Italy to offer, along with the Normale in Pisa, a PhD qualification. He then contributed to the creation of Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste. Budinich was also active on the front of science promotion, founding the Immaginario Scientifico, the science centre of Trieste.
His intense activity stimulated the creation of an international research hub that today extends to ICGEB, CBM, Area Science Park and much more, to the point of making Trieste a scientific excellence, among the cities with the highest density of research scientists per inhabitant.
IMAGE:
• Paolo Budinich (credits: Andrea Lasorte)
Contacts:
Communication Office: [email protected] Tel: (+39) 040 3787557 | (+39) 340-5473118, (+39) 333-5275592 via Bonomea, 265 34136 Trieste
More information about SISSA: www.sissa.it