Light for Humanity

The year 2015 is the United Nations International Year of Light and Light-Based Technologies (IYL). ICTP, which is hosting the IYL Secretariat, has been actively involved in promoting  events throughout the year to raise awareness of the science of light and optical technologies. To that end, the Centre will participate in Italy's Genoa Science Festival, sponsoring a session on Light for Humanity.

The session will be held on 30 October 2015 during a half-day showcase of international research institutes supported by the Italian Government and the UN and based in Trieste, including The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), and the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB). The activity is organized in collaboration with Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

The ICTP session will feature a roundtable discussion on how photonics have evolved over the past century to become indispensible to daily life thanks to their contribution to the development of smart phones, fiber optics and computers. Panelists will include:

• Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, an astrophysicist who, with her thesis advisor, Nobel laureate Antony Hewish, discovered the first pulsar. She is a visiting professor at Oxford University, pro-rector of Trinity College, Dublin, and the first female president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's National Academy.
• Alessandro Farini, lead researcher at the Laboratory of Visual Ergonomics, National Institute of Optics-CNR in Florence and professor at the University of Florence where he teaches photophysics vision and psychophysics. His research work focuses in lighting and ophthalmic optics.
• Emilia Giorgetti, senior researcher at the Institute for Physics of Complex Systems, CNR, whose research has focused on organic fluorescent materials, metal-dielectric surface interactions, nanomaterials and plasmonics. Since March 2015, she is Scientific Attaché at the Embassy of Italy in Mexico City.
• ICTP Director Fernando Quevedo
• Linda Wamune, director of SunnyMoney Kenya and the founder and CEO of Brighter Life Kenya, and representative of SolarAid at the UN Climate Summit in New York in September 2014.