The International School for Advanced Studies (Italian: Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati; SISSA) is an international, state-supported, post-graduate-education and research institute in Trieste, Italy.
SISSA is active in the fields of mathematics, physics and neuroscience, offering both undergraduate and post-graduate courses. Each year, about 70 PhD students are admitted to SISSA based on their scientific qualifications. SISSA also runs master's programs in the same areas, in collaboration with both Italian and other European universities.
History
SISSA was founded in 1978, as a part of the reconstruction following the Friuli earthquake of 1976. Although the city of Trieste itself did not suffer any damage, physicist Paolo Budinich asked and obtained from the Italian government to include in the interventions the institution of a new, post-graduate teaching and research institute, modeled on the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. The school became operative with a PhD course in theoretical physics, and Budinich himself was appointed as general director.
In 1986, Budinich left his position to Daniele Amati, who at the time was at the head of the theoretical division at CERN. Under his leadership, SISSA expanded its teaching and research activity towards the field of neuroscience, and instituted a new interdisciplinary laboratory aiming at connecting humanities and scientific studies.
From 2001 to 2004, the director was the Italian geneticist Edoardo Boncinelli, who fostered the development of the existing research areas. From 2004 to 2010, the director was the Italian physicist Stefano Fantoni. His period as director has been characterized by the design and construction of the new SISSA location. Other directors were appointed in the following years, which saw the strengthening of SISSA collaboration with other Italian and European universities in offering master's degree programs in the three areas of the School (mathematics, physics and neuroscience). Physicist Stefano Ruffo served as the director from 2015 until 2021, when he was succeeded by Andrea Romanino.
Campus
The SISSA building
Until July 2010, the school was located near the Miramare Park and marine reserve, about 10 kilometres from the city centre. The Miramare campus still hosts the ICTP (International Center for Theoretical Physics) and the Department of Theoretical Physics[1] of the University of Trieste.
The campus is located in the borough of Opicina; it is accessible by bus 38 of Trieste Trasporti (TPL FVG). The campus is also equipped with a canteen, a kindergarten, a gym, as well as an open air theatre, which is used for shows, conferences and activities for the wider public.
Departments
SISSA houses the following research groups in the field of Astroparticle Physics,[2] Astrophysics,[3] Condensed Matter,[4] Molecular and Statistical Biophysics,[5] Statistical Physics,[6] Theoretical Particle Physics,[7] Cognitive Neuroscience[8] Neurobiology,[9] Molecular Biology,[10] Applied Mathematics, Geometry[11] Mathematical Analysis, and[12] Mathematical Physics[11]
In addition, there is the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Natural and Humanistic Sciences (ILAS - Laboratorio Interdisciplinare Scienze Naturali e Umanistiche), which is endowed with the task of making connections between science, humanities, and the public. Since 1992 it also organizes a course in Science Communication and Scientific journalism.[13]
According to the last aggregate data issued by ANVUR - the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research Systems - SISSA ranks:
first among medium-sized universities and research centers in physical science, with a 22% positive variance in the number of products compared to the Italian average;
first among small-sized universities and research centers in biological science, owing to the activity carried out in neuroscience, with a 64% positive variance;
second among small-sized universities in mathematical and computer science. With reference to the latter, the positive variance in the scientific production corresponded to 46% compared to the national average, placing SISSA 1% away from the Scuola Normale di Pisa.
JCOM América Latina (JCOMAL), published in-house by SISSA; a Spanish- and Portuguese-language peer-reviewed journal for popular science in Latin America[22]
Proceedings of Science (PoS), published in-house by SISSA, a non-peer-reviewed series of conference proceedings[16]
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to physics:
The University of Trieste is a public research university in Trieste in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region in northeast Italy. The university consists of 10 departments, has a wide and almost complete range of university courses and has about 15,000 students and 1,000 professors. It was founded in 1924.
Dennis William Siahou Sciama, was an English physicist who, through his own work and that of his students, played a major role in developing British physics after the Second World War. He was the PhD supervisor to many famous physicists and astrophysicists, including John D. Barrow, David Deutsch, George F. R. Ellis, Stephen Hawking, Adrian Melott and Martin Rees, among others; he is considered one of the fathers of modern cosmology.
In statistics and machine learning, double descent is the phenomenon where a statistical model with a small number of parameters and a model with an extremely large number of parameters have a small error, but a model whose number of parameters is about the same as the number of data points used to train the model will have a large error.
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) is an international research institute for physical and mathematical sciences that operates under a tripartite agreement between the Italian Government, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). It is located near the Miramare Park, about 10 kilometres from the city of Trieste, Italy. The centre was founded in 1964 by Pakistani Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam.
Giorgio Parisi is an Italian theoretical physicist, whose research has focused on quantum field theory, statistical mechanics and complex systems. His best known contributions are the QCD evolution equations for parton densities, obtained with Guido Altarelli, known as the Altarelli–Parisi or DGLAP equations, the exact solution of the Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model of spin glasses, the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation describing dynamic scaling of growing interfaces, and the study of whirling flocks of birds. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro Manabe for groundbreaking contributions to theory of complex systems, in particular "for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales".
The Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by IOP Publishing, the publishing branch of the Institute of Physics. It is part of the Journal of Physics series and covers theoretical physics focusing on sophisticated mathematical and computational techniques.
Journal of Physics is a peer-reviewed scientific journal series published by IOP Publishing; it currently consists of the following journals.
Astroparticle Physics is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering experimental and theoretical research in the interacting fields of cosmic ray physics, astronomy and astrophysics, cosmology, and particle physics. It was established in 1992 and is published monthly by North-Holland, an imprint of Elsevier. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2020 impact factor of 2.724.
The Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics (JETP) [Russian: Журнал Экспериментальной и Теоретической Физики (ЖЭТФ), or Zhurnal Éksperimental'noĭ i Teoreticheskoĭ Fiziki (ZhÉTF)] is a peer-reviewed Russian bilingual scientific journal covering all areas of experimental and theoretical physics. For example, coverage includes solid-state physics, elementary particles, and cosmology. The journal is published simultaneously in both Russian and English languages. The editor-in-chief is Alexander F. Andreev. In addition, this journal is a continuation of Soviet physics, JETP (1931–1992), which began English translation in 1955.
IOP Publishing is the publishing company of the Institute of Physics. It provides publications through which scientific research is distributed worldwide, including journals, community websites, magazines, conference proceedings and books. The Institute of Physics is a scientific charity devoted to increasing the practice, understanding and application of physics. Any financial surplus earned by IOP Publishing goes to support physics through the activities of the Institute.
Asghar QadirHI, SI, FPAS, is a Pakistani mathematician and a prominent cosmologist, specialised in mathematical physics and physical cosmology. Nowadays, he is widely considered one of the top mathematicians in Pakistan. Asghar has played a prominent role in promoting Relativity in Pakistan. To this day, Qadir has made important and significant contributions to the fields of differential equations, theoretical cosmology and mathematical physics. He is noted for his work in mathematics and mathematical physics, in particular his contributions to general relativity and cosmology.
The International Journal of Modern Physics is a series of Physics journals published by World Scientific.
The Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics is an online-only peer-reviewed scientific journal focusing on all aspects of cosmology and astroparticle physics. This encompasses theory, observation, experiment, computation and simulation. It has been published jointly by IOP Publishing and the International School for Advanced Studies since 2003. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics has been a part of the SCOAP3 initiative. But from 1 January 2017, it has moved out from SCOAP3 agreement.
Luciano Fonda was an Italian theoretical physicist, author of a hundred of scientific publications, including a book on quantum symmetries. His research activity covered several areas, from nuclear and subnuclear physics to condensed state physics.
Stavros Katsanevas was a Greek-French astrophysicist who was director of the European Gravitational Observatory, professor at the Université Paris Cité, former director of the AstroParticle and Cosmology (APC) laboratory and former chairman of the Astroparticle Physics European Consortium (APPEC). In 2000, he received for his work on supersymmetry the Physics Prize from the Academy of Athens. In 2011, he was awarded the Ordre National du Merite. He was an ordinary member of Academy of Europe, Earth and Cosmic Sciences since 2019.
Paolo Budinich was an Italian theoretical physicist. Born in Lussingrande to a family of sailors, he grew up and studied in Trieste, where the family resided and his father Antonio Budini taught in the local high school, which Paolo attended until 1934. He later began his studies at Università Degli Studi di Pisa graduating from the Scuola Normale Superiore in 1938, with a thesis written under the direction of Leonida Tonelli.
Laura Baudis (1969) is a Romanian-born Swiss particle astrophysicist. She is employed as a full professor by the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her research focuses on dark matter and neutrino physics. She is a member of the science strategy team for XENON as well as the CERN Scientific Policy Committee (2016–18) and the PSI Research Committee for Particle Physics.
Stefano Fantoni is an Italian theoretical physicist, now retired from the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste (SISSA), still working in the fields of nuclear physics and low temperature physics.
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