The Executive Council of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), the international organisation representing the global community of physicists, has just announced that Trieste has been chosen as the location of its next Central Secretariat. SISSA played a crucial role in the transfer.
IUPAP aims include promoting international collaboration in physics, organising, and sponsoring international meetings, promoting the free movement of scientists, encouraging research and teaching, and promoting international agreements on the use of symbols and physical units. Stefano Fantoni, President of the Trieste International Foundation (FIT), and Sandro Scandolo, a scientist at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics "Abdus Salam" (ICTP), will take the posts of Secretary General and Deputy Secretary General for Administrative Affairs.
IUPAP was founded in Brussels in 1922 with 13 member nations and with the British Nobel Prize winner William Bragg as its first President. It currently has 60 member nations and is governed by a General Assembly that meets every three years. The organisation consists of 22 commissions and 15 working groups dedicated to various branches of physics; one commission in particular deals with the definitions and names of the units of measurement in physics.
Prof. Michel Spiro, current IUPAP President, has declared: “We received many generous offers from across the world—to whom bidders I am most grateful and that demonstrate the global commitment to IUPAP. The offer from the Trieste International Foundation was in the end selected by the Executive Council. IUPAP is looking forward to benefit from the competency of the Foundation and further strengthen its links with the international physics community based in Trieste”.
Greeting the announcement, SISSA Director Professor Stefano Ruffo has said: "The IUPAP Executive Council did us a great honour in selecting Trieste and FIT for the organisation’s Central Secretariat, a recognition of Trieste’s entire community of physicists. During the period 2011-14, I held the positions of Chairman of the IUPAP Statistical Physics Commission and Vice-President of IUPAP itself, and I was able to participate in, and direct, top-level activities conducted by this important international organisation."
The transfer of the IUPAP administrative offices from the present Singapore headquarter to the new site at Trieste's Sottostazione Elettrica di Porto Vecchio will be a gradual process completed by the end of 2021.