In March, Pedro Vieira (Perimeter I./ICTP-SAIFR) was awarded a prestigious FAPESP-UNESP Excellence Chair. This program brings outstanding scientists from abroad to create research nuclei in the state of São Paulo, and there are 12 active Chairs in all areas of science. Prof. Vieira was awarded the 2015 Gribov Medal, the 2018 Sackler Prize, and the 2020 New Horizons Prize for his work on integrability and gauge theory.

A scientific paper by Simons-FAPESP tenure-track Professor Ricardo Martinez and collaborators from Princeton University was published in March in PLOS Biology and cited on several online sites such as Phys.org, Eurekalert.org, etc. The article suggests that loners (in this case, individuals of amoeba which do not aggregate into a multicellular organism) could be critical to understanding collective and social behaviors, multicellular development, and ecological dynamics.

Join forces with us: ICTP-SAIFR recently created a website for receiving donations from both private individuals and companies. These donations allow us to attract the top researchers and graduate students to our center, to expand our schools and workshops that train the next generation of physicists, and to engage the general public and high-school students and teachers through our diverse outreach activities.

From January - July of 2020, Prof. José Nelson Onuchic (Rice. U.) is visiting ICTP-SAIFR. Prof Onuchic is co-director of the NSF Center for Theoretical Biological Physics and is investigating how ideas coming from the energy landscape for protein folding can be used to understand genome function.

On March 3, ICTP-SAIFR organized a roundtable discussion on COVID-19 with speakers from Oxford, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Fiocruz. After the roundtable, ICTP-SAIFR associate members Roberto Kraenkel (IFT-UNESP) and Paulo Prado (IB-USP), together with their students and collaborators, helped to create a COVID-19 Observatory which monitors the spread of the disease in Brazil.