I-LAMP Master graduates award: Chiara Devescovi and Matteo Grassi

Chiara Devescovi graduated cum Laude in Physics at Università Cattolica in Brescia with an experimental thesis under the supervision of Prof. Luigi Sangaletti and Prof. Stefania Pagliara. 
Soon after obtaining her Master, she received a scholarship issued by the Swiss National Science Foundation and MARVEL NCCR (National Center Competence Research), joining a 6 months collaboration with the University of Zurich on a research project in Topological Phases of Matter. Chiara is currently a PhD student at the DIPC (Donostia International  Physics Center, Spain) in the Topological Photonics group under the supervision of Dr. Aitzol Garcia Etxarri. Last September, she won a National Investigation scholarship from the Spanish Government (FPI-MICINN) for a research project on Topological Materials, in a collaboration with Dr. Maia Garcia Vergniory.

 Matteo Grassi graduated at Università Cattolica in July 2018 with a master thesis entitled "Holographic complexity in Warped AdS: the volume conjecture", written under the supervision of Prof. Roberto Auzzi and Prof. Giuseppe Nardelli. The thesis explores the field of high energy theoretical physics. In particular, in his work Matteo investigated how it could be possible to study the interior geometry of a black hole by applying the volume conjecture. Such a conjecture is connected to the AdS/CFT correspondence, representing a duality between a gravity theory in asymptotic anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime and a conformal field theory (CFT) located at its boundary. Instead of the usual AdS spacetime, in this work the Warped AdS one is considered as the background for the computations. The thesis also contains studies related to the action conjecture, which subsequently gave origin to a paper published on the journal JHEP.
Since September 2018, Matteo is employed as a high school Professor of Physics and Maths and currently he works at Licei dell'Opera Sant'Alessandro in Bergamo.

I-LAMP early career award (academic): Alessandro Sepe

Alessandro Sepe is a Full Professor of Big Data Science, Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and Internet of Things (IoT) applied to Multidisciplinary Science at Large National Scientific Facilities, as well as Head of the Big Data Science Center at the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhangjiang National Laboratory, China. He graduated in Physics at Universita’ Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in 2006, under Prof. Luigi Sangaletti, with a thesis on the “Magnetic and Electronic properties of the Mn:Ge (111) System”. He obtained his PhD in Physics at the University of Munich (TUM), Germany. He was then a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, U.K., focusing on synchrotron and material science. As Group Leader he moved to the Adolphe Merkle Institute, University of Fribourg, Switzerland, extending  his research interests to the fields of High Performance Computing (HPC) and Big Data Science applied to Multidisciplinary Science at Large National Scientific Facilities, as well as leading a Swiss National Synchrotron Big Data initiative. He is now heading the deployment of a novel Big Data Science National Platform at the SSRF, where A.I., Real-time remote unmanned experiments, IoT, Robotic Automation and High Performance Cloud / Fog Supercomputing converge to create the first-ever World-Class User-Friendly Scientific Superfacility in China, elastically interfaced with the top Chinese National Supercomputer Centers nationwide, and aimed at dramatically accelerating and automatizing the multidisciplinary researches of all the users at the Large National Scientific Facilities (Synchrotrons, Neutron Facilities, X-ray Free Electron Lasers / XFELs etc.), thus dramatically increasing the rate of their scientific discoveries and the resulting technological advancements, with a clear societal impact. Therefore, this Big Data Science Platform targets the researches that several national and international universities, academies, research institutes and industries are pursuing at SSRF in China, where a huge support in terms of Scientific Computation is required in order to enable the most complete knowledge transfer from scientific research to industrial development.

I-LAMP early career award (non academic): Anna Lombardi

Anna Lombardi graduated in Physics at Università Cattolica in 2010 with a master thesis on the “optical properties of individual metal nanoparticles” realised in collaboration with the University of Lyon (France) and written under the supervision of Prof. Francesco Banfi. In 2013 she received her PhD from the University of Lyon. Her PhD research studies, carried out under the direction of Prof. Fabrice Vallee and Prof. Natalia Del Fatti, focused on the linear and ultrafast response of single multi-material nanoparticles (in particular gold-silica bipyramids and gold-silver heterodimers). Her thesis has been awarded with the “Prix Jeunes Chercheures Saint Gobain 2013” by the French Physics Society. She extended her research in the field of plasmonic sensing at the University of Cambridge (UK), where she worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the NanoPhotonics Group led by Prof. Jeremy Baumberg for three years.
In 2018, she completed a Master in Science Communication at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste (Italy).
Since November 2018, she works as a data and interactive journalist at The Times and Sunday Times in London, specialising in visual journalism and finding stories in data. Before joining the Times, she has worked for a year in the press office of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste and as a member of the Euroscience Open Forum 2020 (ESOF2020) communication team.