Caterina Biscari, director of the Alba Synchrotron and lecturer in the Department of Physics at the UAB, will be awarded the Gold Medal of the Generalitat, the highest distinction awarded by the Government of Catalonia. Biscari will receive the award on 8 September in an official ceremony in which the chef Ferran Adrià will also be honoured with the award.
Biscari is an experimental physicist known for her significant contributions to the design, construction and operation of particle accelerators. Since 2012, she has been the director of the ALBA Synchrotron. Located in Cerdanyola del Vallès, near the UAB campus, it is one of Europe's most prominent scientific infrastructures, and the rector of the UAB, Javier Lafuente, is a member of its governing board.
Biscari has also served as president of the League of European Accelerator-based Photon Sources (LEAPS), an alliance of all European synchrotron and free-electron laser facilities. In addition, she worked at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) and at the Frascati National Laboratory of Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics.
She is a member of the European Physical Society and of various international committees and advisory boards, including the CERN Scientific Policy Committee, the Advisory Board of the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, and the Scientific Advisory Committee of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation (KEK) in Japan.
Fourth generation
Currently, the ALBA Synchrotron has fourteen beamlines that allow for the visualisation of the structure and properties of matter. Its advanced technologies, detectors, and data infrastructures are used annually by more than 3,500 researchers in fields as diverse as biomedicine, nanotechnology, chemistry, materials physics, and energy.
Last year, the Government of Catalonia and the Spanish Ministry for Science, Innovation and Universities signed an agreement establishing a joint contribution of nearly €1 billion through 2038 to transform the ALBA Synchrotron into a fourth-generation synchrotron light facility.
