ICRANet


ICRANet, the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics Network, is an international organization which promotes research activities in relativistic astrophysics and related areas. Its members are four countries and three Universities and Research Centers: Armenia, the Federative Republic of Brazil, Italian Republic, the Vatican City State, the University of Arizona, Stanford University and ICRA.
ICRANet headquarters are located in Pescara, Italy.

History of ICRANet foundation: ICRA and ICRANet

ICRA and ICRANet

In 1985, the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics ICRA was founded by Remo Ruffini together with Riccardo Giacconi, Abdus Salam, Paul Boynton, George Coyne, Francis Everitt and Fang Li-Zhi.
The Statute and the Agreement establishing ICRANet were signed on March 19, 2003, and they were recognized in the same year by the Republic of Armenia and the Vatican City State. ICRANet has been created in 2005 by a law of the Italian Government, ratified by the Italian Parliament and signed by the President of the Italian Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi on February 10, 2005. The Republic of Armenia, Italian Republic, the Vatican City State, ICRA, the University of Arizona and the Stanford University are the founding members.
On September 12, 2005, ICRANet Steering Committee was established and had its first meeting: Remo Ruffini and Fang Li-Zhi were appointed respectively Director and Chairman of the Steering Committee. On December 19, 2006 ICRANet Scientific Committee was established and had its first meeting in Washington DC. Riccardo Giacconi was appointed Chairman and John Mester Co-Chairman.
On September 21, 2005 the Director of ICRANet signed, together with the then Ambassador of Brazil in Rome Dante Coelho De Lima the adhesion of the Federative Republic of Brazil to ICRANet. The entrance of Brazil, requested by the then President of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been unanimously ratified by the Brazilian Parliament. On August 12, 2011, the then President of Brazil Dilma Rousseff signed the entrance of Brazil in ICRANet.

Marcel Grossmann meetings

By the beginning of the twentieth century the new branch of mathematics, tensor calculus, was developed in the works of Gregorio Ricci Curbastro and Tullio Levi Civita of the University of Padua and the University of Rome "La Sapienza". Marcel Grossmann of the University of Zurich who had a deep knowledge of the Italian school of geometry and who was close to Einstein introduced to him these concepts. The collaboration between Einstein and Grossmann was essential for the development of General Relativity.
Remo Ruffini and Abdus Salam in 1975 established the Marcel Grossmann meetings on Recent Developments in Theoretical and Experimental General Relativity, Gravitation, and Relativistic Field Theories, which take place every three years in different countries, gathering more than 1000 researchers. MG1 and MG2 were held in 1975 and in 1979 in Trieste; MG3 in 1982 in Shanghai; MG4 in 1985 in Rome; MG5 in 1988 in Perth; MG6 in 1991 in Kyoto; MG7 in 1994 at Stanford; MG8 in 1997 in Jerusalem; MG9 in 2000 in Rome; MG10 in 2003 in Rio de Janeiro; MG11 in 2006 in Berlin; MG12 in 2009 in Paris; MG13 in 2012 in Stockholm; MG14 in 2015 and MG15 in 2018 both in Rome. Since its foundation, ICRANet has always played a leading role in the organization of those meetings.

Celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009

ICRANet has been Organizational Associate of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 and supported the global coordination of IYA2009 financially. In this occasion ICRANet organized a series of international meetings under the general title "The Sun, the Star, the Universe and General Relativity" including: the 1st Zeldovich meeting, the Sobral Meeting, the 1st Galileo - Xu Guangqi meeting, the 11th Italian-Korean Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics and the 5th Australasian Conference - Christchurch Meeting.

Celebration of the International Year of Light 2015

Under the initiative of the United Nations and UNESCO, 2015 was declared the International Year of Light, and it represented the centenary of the formulation of the equations of general relativity by Albert Einstein, and the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of relativistic astrophysics. ICRANet was a "Bronze Associate" sponsor of those celebrations.
In 2015, ICRANet also organized a series of international meetings including: the Second ICRANet César Lattes Meeting, the International Conference on Gravitation and Cosmology / the 4th Galileo-Xu Guangqi meeting, Fourteenth Marcel Grossmann Meeting - MG14, the 1st ICRANet Julio Garavito Meeting on Relativistic Astrophysics, the 1st Sandoval Vallarta Caribbean Meeting on Relativistic Astrophysics.

Organization and structure

The organization consists of the Director, the Steering Committee and the Scientific Committee. The members of committees are representatives
of the countries and member institutions. ICRANet has a number of permanent Faculty positions. Their activities are supported by administrative staff and secretariat personnel. ICRANet financing is based by Statute on the funds provided by the governments and by voluntary contributions, donations.
The initial Director of ICRANet appointed in 1985 was Remo Ruffini. Ruffini remains Director as of 2024.
In 2023 the Steering Committee consists of:
  • Albania: Elida Bylyku
  • Armenia: Nouneh Zastoukhova
  • ICRA: Yu Wang
  • Italy:
  • # Italian Foreign Ministry, Unità Scientifica e Tecnologica Bilaterale e Multilaterale: Amb. Lorenzo Angeloni, Cons. Alessandro Garbellini,
  • # Ministry of Economy and Finance, Ragioneria Generale dello Stato, IGAE, Uff. IX: Dr. Antonio Bartolini, Dr. Salvatore Sebastiano Vizzini
  • # MIUR: Dr. Vincenzo Di Felice, Dott.ssa Giulietta Iorio
  • # Pescara Municipality: Avv. Carlo Masci
  • Stanford University: Francis Everitt
  • University of Arizona: Xiaohui Fan
  • Vatican City State: Guy J. Consolmagno, S.J.
The current Chairperson of the ICRANet Steering Committee is Francis Everitt.
The first Chairperson of the Scientific Committee was Riccardo Giacconi, Nobel Prize for Physics in 2002, who ended his term in 2013. The current Chairperson of the Scientific Committee is Massimo Della Valle.
The Scientific Committee in 2019 consists of: Prof. Narek Sahakyan, Dr. Barres de Almeida Ulisses, Dr. Carlo Luciano Bianco, Prof. Massimo Della Valle, Prof. John Mester, Prof. Chris Fryer and Dr. Gabriele Gionti.
The Faculty in 2019 consists of Professors Ulisses Barres de Almeida, Vladimir Belinski, Carlo Luciano Bianco, Donato Bini, Pascal Chardonnet, Christian Cherubini, Filippi Simonetta, Robert Jantzen, Roy Patrick Kerr, Hans Ohanian, Giovanni Pisani, Brian Mathew Punsly, Jorge Rueda, Remo Ruffini, Gregory Vereshchagin, and She-Sheng Xue, and is supported by an Adjunct Faculty made up of more than 30 internationally renowned scientists participating in ICRANet activities, and between eighty "Lecturers" and "Visiting Professors". Among these are the Nobel Laureates Murray Gell-Mann, Theodor Hänsch, Gerard 't Hooft and Steven Weinberg.

Member states and institutions

Currently ICRANet members are four countries and three Universities and research centers.
Member states:
CountryDate joined
Armenia

ICRANet seats and centers

The network is composed of several seats and centers. Seat agreements, establishing rights and privileges, including extraterritoriality, have been signed for the seat in Pescara in Italy, for the seat in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and for the seat in Yerevan in Armenia. The Seat Agreement for Pescara has been ratified on May 13, 2010. The Seat agreement for Yerevan has been unanimously approved by the Parliament of Armenia on November 13, 2015.
High-speed optical fiber connection with different locations are made possible by the connection to the pan-European data network for the research and education community through the GARR network.
Currently ICRANet centers are operative at:
ICRANet headquarters are located in Pescara, Italy. This center coordinates ICRANet activities and yearly meetings of the Scientific and the Steering committees are usually held there. International meetings such as the Italian-Korean Symposia on Relativistic Astrophysics are regularly held in this center. Scientific activities in Pescara center include the fundamental research on early cosmology by the Russian school guided by Vladimir Belinski.
Activities of the ICRANet Seat at Villa Ratti in Nice include the coordination of the IRAP PhD program, as well as scientific activities connected with the ultra high energy observations by the University of Savoy and the VLT observations performed by the Côte d'Azur Observatory, which involve the thesis works of IRAP PhD students. The University of Savoy is the closest French lab to the CERN.

ICRANet Center in Armenia

Since January 2014, the ICRANet Center in Yerevan has been established at the Presidium of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia, at Marshall Baghramian Avenue, 24a. Scientific activities in this center are coordinated by the Director, Dr. Narek Sahakyan. In 2014, the Government of Armenia approved the Agreement to establish the ICRANet international center in Armenia. The Seat Agreement has been signed in Rome on February 14, 2015, by the director of ICRANet, Remo Ruffini and the Ambassador of Armenia in Italy, Mr. Sargis Ghazaryan. On November 13, 2015, the Parliament of Armenia unanimously approved the Seat Agreement. Since January 2016 ICRANet Armenia center is registered at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an international organization. The main areas of scientific research in ICRANet-Armenia are in the fields of relativistic astrophysics, astroparticle physics, X-ray astrophysics, high and very high energy gamma-ray astrophysics, high energy neutrino astrophysics. The center is a full member of the MAGIC international collaboration since 2017. Also, the center is actively involved in development of the Open Universe Initiative. In Armenia, the ICRANet center collaborates with other scientific institutions from the Academy and Universities, and provides to organize joint international meetings and workshops, summer schools for PhD students and mobility programs for scientists in the field of Astrophysics. ICRANet center in Armenia coordinates ICRANet activities in the area of Central-Asian and Middle-Eastern countries.
A summer school and an international scientific conference dedicated to the issues of Relativistic Astrophysics "1st Scientific ICRANet Meeting in Armenia: Black Holes: the largest energy sources in the Universe" were held in Armenia from June 28 to July 4, 2014.