Luciano Maiani

Luciano Maiani, past president of the Italian CNR, is one of the leading physicists at international level. He graduated in Rome in 1964 and began his career at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS), soon moving to the University of Florence to join the school of Italian theoretical physicists of Raoul Gatto. In 1969 he went to Harvard, where he worked until 1976. There, in 1970, with Sheldon Lee Glashow and John Iliopoulos, he contributed to extending the family of quarks by postulating the fourth quark, called “charm”. He returned to Italy as professor of theoretical physics at Sapienza University of Rome and became visiting professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (1977) and at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva (1979-1980 and 1985-1986). From 1984 to 1991 he was a member of the CERN Scientific Committee. From 1993 to 1997 he was president of INFN, and from 1 January 1997 to the end of 2003 he was Director General of CERN, giving impetus to the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). He has received many awards, among them the Matteucci Medal of the Accademia dei XL (1979), the Sakurai Prize of the American Physical Society (1987) and the Dirac Medal of the Abdus Salam Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste (2007).