Plenary Lecturers

A British astrophysicist, she graduated from the University of Glasgow with a BSc degree in Natural Philosophy (Physics) in 1965, and obtained her PhD from University of Cambridge in 1969. As a postgraduate student at Cambridge, she discovered the first radio pulsars with her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish, for which Hewish shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. After finishing her PhD, Bell Burnell worked at many wavelengths and in many roles in universities and institutions in Britain while raising a family, and was also a visiting professor at Princeton University in the United States. She is currently a Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Mansfield College Oxford, a pro- Chancellor at Trinity College Dublin and President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s National Academy. She has also served as President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002- 2004, and as President of the Institute of Physics (2008-2011).

Although Bell was not included as a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize, which stoked some controversy at the time, she has been honoured by many organizations. Among other awards, she received the Albert A. Michelson Medal of the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia in 1973, the Magellanic Premium of the American Philosophical Society in 2000 and a Royal Medal from the Royal Society in 2015. She has been awarded numerous honorary degrees too, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and five other Academies. She was appointed a Dame by the British Queen in 2007. Jocelyn Bell’s excellence contribution in science communication has been also awarded with the 2010 Michael Faraday Prize by the Royal Society.

Andrew Blake took up his current post as Institute Director of The Alan Turing Institute in October 2015. He was previously a Microsoft Distinguished Scientist and the Laboratory Director of Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK. Prior to joining Microsoft, Andrew trained in mathematics and electrical engineering in Cambridge, UK, and studied for a doctorate in artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. He was an academic for 18 years, in Edinburgh and latterly on the faculty in Engineering at Oxford University, where he was a pioneer in the development of the theory and algorithms that can make it possible for computers to behave as seeing machines. He has published several books including “Visual Reconstruction” with A. Zisserman (MIT press), “Active Vision” with A. Yuille (MIT Press), and “Active Contours” with M. Isard (Springer-Verlag).

He won the prize of the European Conference on Computer Vision twice, with R. Cipolla in 1992 and with M. Isard in 1996, and was awarded the IEEE David Marr Prize (jointly with K. Toyama) in 2001. In 2006 the Royal Academy of Engineering awarded him its Silver Medal and in 2007 the Institution of Engineering and Technology presented him with the Mountbatten Gold Medal (previously awarded to computer pioneers Maurice Wilkes and Tim Berners-Lee, amongst others). In 2011, he and colleagues at Microsoft Research received the Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Gold Medal for the machine learning recognition capability of the Microsoft Kinect 3D human motioncapture system. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1998, Fellow of the IEEE in 2008, and Fellow of the Royal Society in 2005. In 2010, Andrew was elected to the Council of the Royal Society and in 2012 was appointed to the Council of the EPSRC. He has received honorary Doctorates from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Sheffield.

Alessandra Buonanno earned her PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Pisa in Italy. After a brief period spent at the theory division of CERN, she became a postdoctoral scholar at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES) in France and then was awarded the Tolman Prize Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology in the USA. She was a permanent researcher at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris (IAP) and Laboratoire Astroparticule et Cosmologie (APC) in Paris working for the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) before joining the University of Maryland as physics professor. While at the University of Maryland, Buonanno has been a Fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She was a William and Flora Hewlett Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

She is a Fellow of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Since the Fall 2014 she is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (or Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam and a College Park Professor at the University of Maryland. She is a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute. Her work spans several topics in gravitational physics, in particular theoretical and phenomenological aspects of gravitational-wave physics and astrophysics. She is a Principal Investigator of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

Professor Elena Cattaneo is Director of the Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology and Pharmacology of Neurodegenerative Diseases at the Department of Biosciences, as well as a co-founder and first appointed Director of UniStem, the Centre for Stem Cell Research of the University of Milano. The main research theme of her lab is the molecular pathophysiology of Huntington’s Disease (HD). The lab’s ultimate goal is to identify cells, molecules and pathways that are suitable for therapeutic intervention and new reagents for drug screening in Huntington’s Disease. The lab is composed of 20 scientists and includes an internal management.

Prof Cattaneo’s studies on neural stem cells and Huntington’s disease saw her awarded the “Le Scienze” Price for Medicine and a Gold Medal from the President of the Italian Republic in 2001. In 2005 she was awarded the Marisa Bellisario and Chiara D’Onofrio prizes, in 2006 was nominated Cavaliere Ufficiale (Knight) of the Italian Republic, and in 2013 was appointed senator for life by Italy’s president, Giorgio Napolitano. She was also named Stem Cell Person of the Year in 2013 by Paul Knoepfler and the readers of his blog, and awarded the ISSCR Public Service Award in 2014, with Paolo Bianco and Michele De Luca, for “their recent involvement in public debate and policymaking in Italy, championing rigorous scientific and medical standards and stringent regulatory oversight in the introduction of new stem cell treatments into the clinic.” Prof Cattaneo has published >160 papers in peer-reviewed journals, has given more than 400 invited lectures, and is very active in organizing professional development and outreach events - for both the scientific community and lay public.

French physicist born in Constantine (Algeria), he graduated in Physics and received his PhD from the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris in 1962. In 1960, he joined the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), a connection he maintained until 1964 when he was appointed Professor at the University of Paris. In 1973, he was appointed as Professor of atomic and molecular physics at the Collège de France in Paris, a position that he held for many years. His teaching experience led him to publish several textbooks, which are well appreciated by undergraduate and graduate physics students. He pioneered the research into the various mechanisms that can be used to slow down, cool and trap atoms with a laser beam.

Cohen-Tannoudji and his team were among the first to cool atoms to very low temperatures, lower than one millionth of a degree above absolute zero. The techniques designed by Cohen-Tannoudji and other scientists have resulted in various specific applications, such as more accurate atomic clocks and more precise atomic interferometers and gyrometers to measure the force of gravity and rotation speed. These techniques have been also essential for producing new states of matter like Bose Einstein condensates. He received, with Steven Chu and William Phillips, the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.

François Englert was born in Belgium in 1932. His parents came from a family of Polish Jews who emigrated to Belgium, where they survived the war thanks to the selfless help of many people. François Englert first got a Degree in electrical-mechanical engineering, and after he got a Physics Masters Degree in 1958 and a PhD in 1959. Then he moved to Cornell University (Ithaca, USA) as research associate for a young Professor Robert Brout. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship, and a very fruitful scientific collaboration, that eventually brought them both to share the direction of the theoretical physics group at the University Libre de Bruxelles and to the discovery in 1964 of the mass generating mechanism, namely the Brout-Englert-Higgs (BEH) mechanism. Robert Brout passed away in 2011. François Englert, jointly with Peter Higgs, received the Nobel Laureate in Physics 2013 for this discovery. The Belgian physicist won the Prince of Asturias Award in 2013 too, together with Peter Higgs and the CERN laboratory.

According to modern physics, matter consists of a set of particles that act as building blocks. Between these particles lie forces that are mediated by another set of particles. A fundamental property of the majority of particles is that they have a mass. It was in 1964, when Robert Brout and François Englert published an article about the origin of particle´s mass based in the broken symmetry, and predicted theoretically the existence of a fundamental particle to explain it. Independently, Peter Higgs published an article in the same subject six weeks later. In 2012, two experiments, ATLAS and CMS, conducted at the Large Hadrons Collider of the CERN laboratory, confirmed the existence of such particle, the so-called, Brout-Englert-Higgs boson particle. Prof. Englert has received many other awards and distinctions, including among them the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2004 (with Robert Brout and Peter Higgs). He holds several honorary doctorates from prestigious universities and he is honorary member of the European Physical Society and the Solvay Institute, as well as honorary President of the “Jeunesses Scientifiques of Belgium”. He was ennobled with the title Baron by the King of Belgium.

William (Ned) Friedman is the Arnold Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and the eighth Director of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University in its 144-year history. He is internationally recognized for his research on the evolutionary history of seed plants. Professor Friedman’s studies have fundamentally altered century-old views of the earliest phases of the evolution of flowering plants, Darwin’s “abominable mystery.” Early in his career, he was selected by the U.S. National Science Foundation as a Presidential Young Investigator. He is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and American Association for the Advancement of Science. He currently teaches a freshman seminar at Harvard called “Getting to Know Darwin,” in which the students re-create ten of Charles Darwin’s experiments and read correspondence associated with each topic (yes, the students do visit a pigeon fancier and discover whether earthworms respond to piano and bassoon playing).

As Director of the Arnold Arboretum, Professor Friedman has worked to expand the Arboretum’s societal impact through new and diverse public programming, enhanced communication between scientists and the public, and a reinvigoration of the long-standing relationship between the Arboretum and the biodiversity of Asia. In 2016, after four years of extensive planning, a ten-year initiative was launched to shape and augment the living collections of the Arnold Arboretum for the next century. Plant exploration around the globe will bring new collections of diverse species of woody plants to this remarkable botanical garden in Boston, and ensure that the next generation of plant and environmental scientists trained at Harvard are ready to tackle the challenges of everything from climate change to genomics.

Dudley Herschbach was born in San Jose (California) in 1932. He received his B.S. degree in Mathematics (1954) and M.S. in Chemistry (1955) at Stanford University, followed by an A.M. degree in Physics (1956) and Ph.D. in Chemical Physics (1958) at Harvard, then joined the chemistry faculty of the University of California at Berkeley in 1959. He returned to Harvard in 1963 as Professor of Chemistry where he became Baird Professor of Science (1976-2003). Now an Emeritus Professor at Harvard, in 2005 he joined Texas A&M University as an itinerant professor of physics. Professor Herschbach is a member of many academies and institutions and has received numerous international honors and awards. Along with his collaborator Yuan T. Lee and the Canadian chemist John C. Polanyi, he received in 1986 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for their contributions concerning the dynamics of elementary chemical processes.

Herschbach is a passionate advocate of science education and science for the general public. He frequently lectures students of all ages, imbuing them with his infectious enthusiasm for science and discovery. He long served as Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Society for Science and the Public, which publishes Science News and conducts the Intel Science Talent Search and the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. He also lent his voice to an episode of The Simpsons (Treehouse of Horror XIV, episode 2007), where he presents the Nobel Prize in Physics to Professor Frink.

Martin Karplus was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1930. He received his BA from Harvard College in 1950 and his PhD from Caltech in 1953. He worked at Oxford University as an NSF postdoctoral fellow from 1953 until 1955, when he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois. In 1960 Karplus became professor at Columbia University, and in 1966 at Harvard University, where he was named Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry in 1979. He is also Professeur Conventionné at the Université Louis Pasteur. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and a foreign member of the Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Royal Society of London. He is a Commander in the French Legion of Honor. He has been received honorary degrees from several universities, as well as numerous awards for his many contributions to science, including the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Early in his career Karplus studied magnetic resonance spectroscopy; of particular interest was his theoretical analysis of nuclear spin-spin coupling constants. He made fundamental contributions to the theory of reactive collisions between small molecules based upon trajectory calculations. He was one of the first researchers to apply many-body perturbation theory to atomic and molecular systems. Over the years, Dr. Karplus has conducted research in many areas of theoretical chemistry and biochemistry and has presented his results in over 700 journal articles and book chapters, as well as two books. His primary interest has been to develop and employ theoretical methods for increasing our understanding of chemical and biological problems. His contributions have been instrumental in the transformation of theory from a specialized field to a central part of modern chemistry and more recently of structural biology.

Born in 1943 in Schroda (German-occupied Poland, now Poland), Klaus von Klitzing studied Physics at the Technical University of Braunschweig. He continued his scientific career at the University of Würzburg, receiving his doctorate in 1972 and his habilitation in 1978. Subsequently, he was appointed professor at the Technical University of Munich (1980-1984), before becoming both Honorarprofessor (part-time prof.) at the University of Stuttgart and Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in 1985. Presently, Prof. Dr. Klaus von Klitzing is heading the department “Low Dimensional Electron Systems” at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany.

During his scientific career, Klaus von Klitzing had research stays at the University of Oxford, England, at the High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Grenoble, France, and at the IBM Research Lab in Yorktown Heights, USA. In 1985, the Nobel Prize in Physics 1985 was awarded to Klaus von Klitzing “for the discovery of the quantized Hall effect”. His discovery is used worldwide for high precision measurements and opened the way for new applications and microscopic understandings of nanoelectronic devices.

Sir John Pendry was born in England in July 1943. He has been working at the Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London (UK) since 1981. He began his career in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, followed by six years at the Daresbury Laboratory of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (UK), where he headed the theory group. In collaboration with the Marconi Company, he designed a series of completely novel artificial materials, or “metamaterials”, with properties not found in nature. Successively metamaterials with negative electrical permittivity, then with negative magnetic permeability were designed and constructed. This project culminated in the proposal for a ‘perfect lens’ whose resolution is unlimited by wavelength. He is popularly known for his research into negative refractive indexes and, jointly with David Smith of Duke University, for the creation of the first practical “Invisibility Cloak”.

John Pendry was head of the physics department at Imperial College London and Principal of the Faculty of Physical Sciences. The long list of awards he has received includes, among others, his Fellowship of the Royal Society (1984), honorary fellow of Downing College at Cambridge University, and of the IEEE (International Electrical and Electronic Engineers), the Dirac prize (1996), the Royal Medal of the Royal Society (2006), as well as being knighted for his services to science (2004). More recently, he has been elected a Foreign Associate of the American National Academy of Sciences. In 2013 he received the Newton Medal from the Institute of Physics, and in 2014 he was awarded with the Kavli Prize for nanotechnology.

Alvaro de Rújula was born in Madrid, and later earned a degree and then a PhD in physics from that city’s university (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). He has since worked in Italy (ICTP, Trieste), France (IHES and Saclay, near Paris) and the USA (Universities of Harvard and Boston), as well as at CERN (with a diverse range of statuses, from summer student to Director of the Theory Division). During the 1970s he contributed to the consolidation of the Standard Model of elementary particles, particularly within the field of Quantum Chromodynamics, “enchanted” particles and “hadron” masses. Later on he also worked in other fields, including the possibility of “radiographing” the Earth with neutrinos, measuring their mass in the laboratory, searching for antimatter in the Universe, understanding “cosmic rays” and contributing through sophisticated methods to the discovery of the Higgs boson.

Agustín Sánchez Lavega was born in Bilbao in 1954. From 1980 to 1987 he worked at the German-Spanish Astronomical Center– Max Planck Institut für Astronomie (Calar Alto Observatory) in Almería. In 1986 he earned a PhD in Physics from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), winning the extraordinary doctorate prize for his thesis. In 1987 he started work at the Bilbao Higher Technical School of Engineering, which forms part of UPV/EHU, where he is currently a Professor of Applied Physics and Director of the Applied Physics I Department. He has been a member of the advisory committee for the ESA Exploration of the Solar System and is currently an advisor to the E-ELT’s Scientific Programme (European Extremely Large Telescope, European Southern Observatory) and the National Astronomy Commission.

His research is focused mainly on the study of planetary atmospheres, and he is the director of the Planetary Science Group at UPV/EHU. He is a co-researcher on the European Space Agency’s space missions Venus Express, ExoMars18 and JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer), as well as on NASA’s Mars 2020 mission. He has published more than 200 papers in specialized research journals, including 10 in the prestigious journals Nature (where he has featured on the cover 4 times) and Science. He has lectured all over Spain and given classes, seminars and courses at numerous universities and cultural centres. He has also written many science dissemination articles, as well as several chapters for books and encyclopaedias. He is the author of the textbook “An Introduction to Planetary Atmospheres” (published by Taylor & Francis - CRC, USA) and is the director of the AulaEspaZio Gela and head of the Master’s Degree Course in Science, Technology and Space Observation. He has directed and co-directed 13 doctoral theses, with another 4 currently underway. In 2010 he won an award for the best paper published in the Spanish Physics Journal and in 2014 won the University Level Physics Teaching and Dissemination award conferred by the Royal Spanish Physics Society – BBVA Foundation.