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Name of creator

Luciano Maiani

Administrative or biographical history

Luciano Maiani was born in Rome on 16 July 1941. He obtained a degree in physics in 1964, then became a research associate at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità. During that same year he collaborated with R. Gatto's Theoretical Physics group at the University of Florence. In 1969 he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Lyman Laboratory of Physics, Harvard University, then a Professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of Rome in 1976. He was visiting professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, in 1977, and at CERN during 1979-80 and 1985-86.

He became professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Rome, "La Sapienza" in 1984, and from January 1993 to December 1998 he was President of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN). He was a member of CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron Committee (*?-1983), Large Hadron Collider Committee (*1992-?) and Scientific Policy Committee (*dates). From 1993 to 1996 he served as part of the Italian to the CERN Council before becoming President from January 1997 to December 1998. In 1999 he was appointed Director-General of CERN until the end of 2003, replacing Christopher Llewellyn Smith. He became President of Italy’s National Research Council (CNR) in 2008. Awards he has received include the 1987 ‘J. Sakurai’ Prize of the American Physical Society and the 2007 Dirac Medal (with John Iliopoulos).

Immediate source of acquisition or transfer

Director-General's office