Eugenio Coccia named new director of the IFAE

Eugenio Coccia will be the IFAE’s fourth director, succeeding ICREA research professor Ramon Miquel, who was appointed director in 2015 and will now continue his work at the IFAE leading the research group in observational cosmology. Matteo Cavalli-Sforza was the IFAE’s director from 2008 to 2014, and Enrique Fernández was the founding director of the institute, a position he occupied from 1991 to 2008.

The appointment of Eugenio Coccia as director of the IFAE is the result of an international selection process coordinated by the CERCA Institution and in which the IFAE’s External Scientific Advisory Committee participated.

Eugenio Coccia is an experimental physicist expert in astroparticle physics. He focuses his research on the study and detection of gravitational waves, as well as the development of very low temperature technologies for fundamental physics experiments. He graduated in Physics cum laude from the University of Rome in 1980 in the group of Edoardo Amaldi. He was a post-doc and then fellow at CERN (1981-1985), and research scientist (1985-1987) and physics lecturer (1988-2016) at the Tor Vergata University of Rome. He spent various periods of research activity at CERN, at the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory in Leiden, and at the INFN Laboratory of Frascati. He was the director of the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory (2003-2009) and founding director of the school for advanced studies Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI), of which he was the rector until now. Eugenio Coccia is member honoris causa of the Academia Europaea and member of the European Physical Society.