Silvia Leoni from University of Milan and INFN-Italy is the Winner of the Friedel-Volterra Winner for 2024, for the important seminal work for the understanding of nuclear structure far from stability and at high excitation, in the order-chaos transition region.
The prize honors the memory of the Italian and French scientists Vito Volterra and Jacques Friedel. It is jointly established by the Italian Physical Society (SIF) together with the Société Française de Physique (SFP) and it awards a physicist involved in some Italian-French collaboration, in recognition of distinguished work in Physics research carried out within the past 10 years.
Silvia Leoni is Professor of Experimental Nuclear Physics at the University of Milan. She received her PhD in 1992 from the University of Milan, with research activity at the Tandem Laboratory of the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark. Since 2017 she is full professor at our Department. Silvia has carried out her activity within the nuclear spectroscopy group, focusing in particular on the variety of phenomena connected with the excitation of atomic nuclei, observed through their gamma decay: she studied how the properties of collective transitions change with increasing level density, and the coexistence of different nuclear shapes as a function of the angular momentum of the system, in particular in superdeformed nuclei.
Silvia is currently spokesperson for the international collaboration AGATA that has developed the most advanced gamma spectrometer in Europe, now in operation at the Legnaro Laboratories of the INFN, where Silvia chairs the Program Advisory Committee. She is the Italian representative in the NuPECC committee (Nuclear Physics Expert Collaboration Committee), for which she contributed to the preparation of the strategic plan in 2024, and since 2025 she has been Editor in Chief for the Experimental Nuclear Physics section of the European Physical Journal A.
Subscribe to RSS Feed