Antonio Ereditato

Antonio Ereditato is Visiting Professor at the Physics Department (joint Yale-FNAL position), and Emeritus Professor at the University of Bern. He carried out research activities in the field of experimental neutrino physics, of weak and strong interactions with experiments conducted at CERN, J-PARC, Fermilab and Gran Sasso.  Ereditato has accomplished several R&D studies on particle detectors: wire chambers, calorimeters, time projection chambers, nuclear emulsions, detectors for medical applications. After the PhD in Napoli, Ereditato had positions at CNRS Strasbourg, CERN Geneva and at the INFN Napoli, where he has been Director of Research since from 1998 to 2006. From 2006 to 2020 Ereditato has been Ordinary Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at the University of Bern, where he has been Director of the Laboratory for High Energy Physics from 2006 to 2020. He served in several international scientific committees: SPSC, CNGS and LHCC at CERN, and is presently member of the PAC of JINR Dubna, of the International Scientific Advisor Committee of the Fermilab Neutrino Physics Center, and of the DOE International Neutrino Council. Ereditato has been also member of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He served in Advisory Committees of international conferences, such as the Calorimetry Conference. Referee and peer review member of international journals and of Funding Agencies, Ereditato is currently Editor-in-Chief of Instruments. Ereditato is also member of the Aspen Institute Italia and president of SAIS (Association of the Italian Academics in Switzerland). 

As head of the ATLAS Bern group, Ereditato contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. In the framework of the T2K experiment, in 2013 he took part in the discovery of the appearance of neutrino oscillations and with the OPERA collaboration he shared the discovery of tau-neutrino appearance. For these results Ereditato was co-recipients of the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. He is currently involved in the MicroBooNE and SBND experiments at Fermilab aimed at the search for sterile neutrinos. He has been one of the founders of the DUNE experiment for the high precision study of neutrino oscillations and astroparticle physics. With the Bern group ihe contributed to the realization of the Near Detector of the experiment with the so-called ArgonCube liquid argon time projection chamber. From 2008 to 2012 Antonio Ereditato has been the spokesperson of the OPERA experiment. 

Ereditato is author of more than 1300 scientific publications and of over 40 talks at international conferences. He supervised more than 70 master and PhD theses. Antonio Ereditato is very active with scientific divulgation. In particular, he has written for general public: Le Particelle Elementari, Il Saggiatore (2017) — English version, Ever Smaller, MIT Press (2020) — and Guida Turistica per Esploratori dello Spazio, Il Saggiatore (2019); together with Edoardo Boncinelli: Il Cosmo della Mente, il Saggiatore (2018) — also published in Spain: El cosmo de la Mente, Tusquets (2020) and in Portugal: O Cosmo da Mente, Presença (2019) — and L’Infinito Gioco della Scienza, Il Saggiatore (2020). For these activities, he was awarded the 2017 Caccuri Prize for Literature and Science and the 2017 Maria Antonia Gervasio Prize.

On 2 June 2018, Ereditato was awarded the title of Officer of Merit of the Italian Republic