(Jul. 4) – Filippo Frontera, professor of General Physics at the Faculty of Engineering of the Ferrara University, has been awarded one of the three prestigious Marcel Grossmann Awards for Relativistic Astrophysics. The award ceremony took place at the opening of the 13th Marcel Grossmann Meeting, being held in Stockholm. The prof. Frontera has led the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor Project on board the BeppoSAX satellite, which led to the discovery of GRB X-ray afterglows, and to their optical identification. Since his graduation, his main scientific activity has been carried out in X-ray astronomy. For his researches in GRB astronomy he is among the winners of the Descartes Prize 2002 for the Science of the European Union Committee. He is responsible of the High Energy Astrophysics group at the Physics Department of the Ferrara University. His current research activity is observational and experimental. Among the latter activities, one is ambitious: the development of a hard X-ray focusing lens for space astronomy applications, with a first prototype already developed. (Red)
