Los Angeles – “It’s a great honor and really a nice gift to celebrate my 80th birthday,” comments Physicist Claudio Pellegrini, in an interview to the press. Pellegrini is the second Italian, after Ugo Fano in 1995, to be awarded of Enrico Fermi Award, one of the most prestigious scientific awards in the US, assigned at the White House by the President of the United States. Pellegrini, a former physics professor at UCLA in and US resident since 1978, is “consulting professor” at the Slac National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford, and is considered the father of XFEL, the free-electron X-ray laser, able to multiply our vision capacity. “I may be the father of this laser – added Pellegrini in the interview – But of course, it’s fruit of the work of many people. I’m just the one who put together various studies and results, and proposed to build this laser that is spreading everywhere. There are many projects. A laser was built and became operational in Japan in 2011, while others are under construction: the European XFEL in Hamburg, for example, has as director the Italian Massimo Altarelli, and then there are the projects in Switzerland and Korea.” (9Colonne)
