ICTP Associates Video Series

This year marks the ICTP Associates Programme’s 60th anniversary. From 1 to 3 July 2024, past and current associates will gather at ICTP, in Trieste, and online, to celebrate a successful programme that has impacted the lives and careers of thousands of scientists from across the globe.

The Programme allows researchers from developing countries to build and maintain networks of connections with other researchers, both at ICTP and elsewhere, by giving them the opportunity to regularly spend time at the Centre during their associateship. Created by ICTP founder and late Pakistani Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam, the programme offers a solution to the sense of isolation that scientists working in developing countries often experience, and thus fights brain drain.

Over the past few months, ICTP has been releasing the video series “Science is Our Common Language”, featuring some of the current associates. The sixth and final episode in the series is dedicated to ICTP Simons Associate Amanda Weltman, the South African Research Chair in Physical Cosmology and a full professor at the University of Cape Town, in South Africa. In her work, Weltman tries to uncover the fundamental laws governing our Universe using tools from particle physics. She has also been working in collaboration with experimentalists to find out how fast radio bursts can tell us more about the origin of the universe.

Meet her in this new video:

Weltman did her undergraduate studies at the University of Cape Town, her PhD at Columbia University, in New York, under the supervision of Brian Greene. As a graduate student, she co-authored a series of papers on Chameleon Gravity. She later went on to work as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, in the UK. She has been the director of the High Energy Physics, Cosmology and Astrophysics Theory (HEPCAT) group at the University of Cape Town since 2018.

Meet the protagonists of previous episodes in the series “Science is Our Common Language”:

• Luis Foa Torres, a professor of physics at the University of Chile in Santiago, Chile
• Imrana Ashraf, professor at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan
• Darwin Putungan, professor at the University of the Philippines Los Baños
• Wafaa Khater, associate professor and the dean of the faculty of science at Birzeit University, Palestine
• Flávio Justino, professor at the Federal University of Viçosa, Brazil