Developing theorists from the developing world

Fifty years ago, the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics was established in Trieste, a seaport in northeastern Italy. The ICTP exists to advance research in a number of areas, including high-energy physics, condensed-matter physics, Earth-systems physics, quantitative biology, and mathematics. Details of its 50th-anniverary conference, to be held 6–9 October, have been posted online .

More than 130 000 visitors from 188 countries have taken advantage of the ICTP’s many research and educational opportunities, including summer schools and workshops. The center also has an explicit charge to support scientists and students from the developing world; some programs are explicitly designed for them.

These days, the ICTP is busy establishing partner institutes in the developing world (see the news story in Physics Today, October 2014, page 20). Regional centers that have adopted the ICTP’s structure and unique dual mission are forming in Brazil, China, Mexico, Turkey, and Rwanda—and more sites are being considered, says ICTP director Fernando Quevedo.

But for many developing-world scientists and students, Trieste has been a portal to the international physics community. For example, the ICTP’s associates program pays the travel and lodging expenses for practicing scientists to conduct research and build collaborations in Trieste. The number of associates has grown from 4 in 1964 to 407 this year. And since 1991, the ICTP’s 12-month postgraduate diploma program has given more than 600 students from the developing world a chance to explore advanced research topics, attend physics lectures, and get a leg up in the graduate-school application process.

“I still count it as one of the best years of my life,” says Filipino native Reinabelle Reyes, a 2006 graduate of the ICTP’s diploma program. After her time at the ICTP, Reyes went on to complete her PhD in astrophysics at Princeton University and conduct postdoctoral research at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics in Chicago. “I would have had zero chance of getting into Princeton had I gone straight from the Philippines,” she says. “My recommendation letters from ICTP held a lot of weight.”

Reyes has fond memories of her experience in Trieste, “making friends with people from different countries, taking trips to Venice, and working on equations through the night and not having to worry about anything else.” She is now back in the Philippines, working as a computer science professor at her alma mater, the Ateneo de Manila University, and consulting with the Filipino government on plans for a national space program. A trip back to Trieste may soon be in Reyes’s future; she plans to apply for the associates program. “I now see why [that program] is helpful,” she says. “The time you spend accessing first-world resources and making connections can be invaluable.”

For Egyptian particle theorist Shaaban Khalil, the “ICTP has played a very crucial role in my construction as a scientist.” He was in the first class of ICTP diploma students in 1991. “At the time, I was very interested in supersymmetry, and not many people in Egypt were working on that,” he says. Khalil is now director of the Center for Fundamental Physics (CFP) at the Zewail City of Science and Technology in Cairo, an ambitious network of academic, research, and technology-development institutes envisioned by Egyptian chemistry Nobel laureate Ahmed Zewail. Khalil’s current research portfolio includes supersymmetry, dark matter, dark energy, and string phenomenology.

Since 1997, the year he completed his physics PhD at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Khalil has returned several times to Trieste to conduct research, participate in workshops, build collaborations, and, more recently, finish a book on supersymmetry. Beyond providing a connection to the research community, the ICTP, says Khalil, helped him “absorb the culture of helping others.” That’s how he views his role at the CFP, which in 2012 become the first center to begin operations in Zewail City. Inspired by the ICTP, Khalil is recruiting students for the CFP from Algeria, Palestine, and other neighboring countries whose scientific infrastructure is underdeveloped. The center has also organized a course for Egyptian university lecturers on teaching basic physics.