Sept. 16 – From Paris to Moscow, the University of Trento is once again on the international stage of excellence. The Italian university brought home two international awards in a single month. The Department of Physics, specifically, is to be praised: two of its members – a professor and a graduate student – received important recognitions. Theoretical Physics professor Sergio Zerbini, who works on mathematical methods and models, became Honorary Professor at Tomsk State Pedagogical University, in Russia. And Massimo Borghi, a student enrolled in the second year at the Physics graduate school, was awarded the “Best Student Oral Presentation” award from “Nature Photonics” during an international congress of photonics held in Paris. Zerbini explained that this recent honor is due to the special collaboration partnership that was set up in 1992 by the researchers of the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics and their Russian colleagues: “Scientific collaborations with TSTB began more than twenty years ago. With colleagues Guido Cognola and Luciano Vanzo and our research group, we started working with Sergei Odintsov of TSTB as far back as 1992. We still collaborate today, and we will continue in the coming years. So far, we published 25 joint articles in scientific journals of high impact, two of which have more than 200 citations (according to the ISI database Web of Science). Our main research topics include issues of theoretical physics such as the fundamental interactions related to cosmology, in particular the question of the violent initial acceleration of our universe (inflation) after the Big Bang, and that of our universe’s current acceleration (dark energy).”
