From Russia with honour

From left to right: Alexander Sorin, Sergio Ferrara, Olga Fré, Pietro Fré and Victor Matveev.

November 25th-27th 2015, at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), Dubna, in collaboration with the Italian Embassy in the Russian Federation, the 7th Round Table Italy-Russia@Dubna was held with the title: "Hundred years from GR's birth Supergravity gets into its forties". Last day of the meeting, in the framework of a solemn ceremony, the 99^th Medal of Honour of the JINR was awarded to Professor Sergio Ferrara (CERN, Geneva), one of the three founders of Supergravity Theory, with the following citation:

"In recognition of his outstanding contributions to the very founding and to the development of the Theory of Supergravity, on the special occasion of his 70th jubilee and of the 100th anniversary of General Relativity that, since 40 years ago, Supergravity has promoted to a higher symmetry".

The Medal of Honour of JINR is a quite exclusive award whose recipients, 99 in 60 years of life of the Institute, are all distinguished scientists of world-wide fame who have given extremely important original contributions to the development of fundamental science. The next award whose ceremony is planned on March 25th 2016, in connection with the official opening of the NICA accelerator complex construction, is to Nobel Laureate David Gross, whose fundamental predictions the NICA collider is expected to investigate experimentally in a near future.

During the same ceremonial session of November 27th 2015, Professor Pietro Fré (Torino University), currently acting as Scientific Counselor of the Italian Embassy in the Russian Federation, was graduated Honorary Doctor of JINR with the following citation: "For outstanding contribution to the advancement of science and the education of young scientists".

An excellent score for Italian physicists!