IFAE’s Governing Board has appointed Prof. Eugenio Coccia as the new director of the Institut de Física d’Altes Energies (IFAE), one of the BIST centres, effective on November 15, 2022.
Eugenio Coccia will be the fourth director of IFAE, succeeding ICREA research professor Ramon Miquel, who has been director from 2015 and will remain at IFAE as a research group leader in the observational cosmology group. Matteo Cavalli-Sforza was director of IFAE from 2008 to 2014 and Enrique Fernández was the founder and first director of IFAE (1991-2008).
The appointment of Eugenio Coccia as director of IFAE is the result of an international selection process coordinated by the CERCA Institution and in which IFAE’s External Scientific Advisory Committee participated.
About Eugenio Coccia
Eugenio Coccia is an experimental physicist expert in astroparticle physics. He has focused his research on the study and detection of gravitational waves, as well as the development of very low temperature technologies for fundamental physics experiments
Eugenio Coccia graduated in Physics cum laude in Rome University in 1980 in the group of Edoardo Amaldi. He was a post-doc and then Fellow at CERN (1981-1985), and research scientist (1985-1987) and professor of Physics (1988-2016) at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. He spent various periods of research activity at CERN, at the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory in Leiden and at the INFN Laboratory of Frascati.
He was the director of the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory (2003-2009) and founding director of the school for advanced studies Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) , of which he was the rector until now. He is member honoris causa of the Academia Europaea and a Fellow of the European Physical Society.