Another Italian is heading one of the four major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. Federico Antinori, an INFN researcher, is in fact the new head of ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), dedicated in particular to the study of quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter believed to have existed soon after the Big Bang. ALICE is an international collaboration of more than 1,500 physicists, engineers and technicians from 37 countries worldwide. Federico Antinori is a researcher of the Padua Section of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN). A graduate of the University of Genoa with a thesis on the WA82 experiment, implemented at the SPS accelerator at CERN, already in the early 90s he started to study ultra-relativistic nucleus-
nucleus collisions. He has participated in numerous experiments with heavy ions, such as WA85, WA94 and WA97 at CERN. In 1996, he presented the proposal for the NA57 nucleus-nucleus collision experiment, for which he was responsible throughout the life of the detector. The results of NA57, along with those of WA97, contributed to determining the evidence of the existence of quark and gluon plasma, which was announced at CERN in 2000. Antinori has been part of the ALICE collaboration since its inception, acting as deputy director of the experiment 2007-2008, a period in which ALICE passed from the construction to the operational phase. Antinori has held numerous senior management
positions over the years, from 2012 to date, the years in which the experiment produced many of its key results, he has been the coordinator of the physics of ALICE. Antinori takes over from another Italian, Paolo Giubellino, who coordinated ALICE from 2011 to 2016
