PEOPLE
THE L’ORÉAL-UNESCO PRIZE AWARDED
TO THE USE OF PARTICLES IN MEDICINE
Interview with Nicoletta Protti, post doc researcher at the INFN division in Pavia, selected among the five winners of the XIII edition of the “L’Oréal Italia for Women and Science” award
The award is part of the international L'Oréal-UNESCO "For Women in Science" project, dedicated to the promotion of scientific vocations in women. In the Italian edition, every year the award selects five researchers under 35 years of age and their projects, selected from hundreds of submissions. Nicoletta Protti's project, “Preliminary feasibility studies of X-ray treatment for Alzheimer's disease based on neutron bombardment of neurotoxic amyloid aggregates", falls within the scope of a broader programme of verification of innovative therapies for Alzheimer's disease and is part of the activities that INFN has been supporting for some time now in the biomedical field.
How did your passion for the application of physics to medical therapy arise?
It is largely due to chance and was initially love at first sight. In my second year of the degree course in physics, I had the opportunity to attend a lecture on hadrontherapy - the medical therapy that uses proton and ion beams - organised in Mortara, the town where I was born, by CNAO, the National Center for Oncology Hadrontherapy in Pavia. It was a lecture for general practitioners to which my mother had been invited.
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NEWS
Research
LHC PREPARES FOR PHYSICS: FIRST COLLISIONS AT 13 TeV
For the first time, at CERN in Geneva, in the LHC, the largest accelerator in the world, collisions at 13 trillion electron volts, 13 TeV, an energy never before achieved in the laboratory, have been produced. ...
Laboratories
AT LNL A NEW CYCLOTRON FOR NUCLEAR
MEDICINE AND PHYSICS
Installation of the new particle accelerator, a P70 cyclotron, in the INFN national Laboratories in Legnaro has just been completed. The exotic nuclei that will be produced by the accelerator ...
International Collaboration
THE ITALIAN EXPERIMENT ICARUS
WILL MOVE TO THE UNITED STATES
A transoceanic trip is planned for the Italian experiment ICARUS in 2017. Under the leadership of Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia, from 2010 to 2014 ICARUS has been operating in the underground Laboratories of the Gran Sasso, ....
Computing
ONE MILLION BILLION OPERATIONS
PER SECOND FOR RESEARCH
After a brief period of testing and acceptance, Galileo, the new supercomputer installed at CINECA in Bologna, went into full operation. The investment is the result of a joint development between INFN and the University of Milan Bicocca. ...
SCF_LAB: A FACILITY FOR SATELLITE TECHNOLOGY AND GENERAL RELATIVITY