A Section with firm roots in the Bologna area and the heart turned to Europe and the world. The capital of Emilia hosts one of the most heterogeneous Sections of INGV, in which the close collaboration between scientists of different backgrounds well reflects the strong bond existing between the three nuclei around which the Institute revolves: Environment, Earthquakes and Volcanoes.
The Bologna Section is preparing to experience a season of great changes and important innovations, which will lead it to weave an even closer relationship with the university world and to take part in the activities of one of the most advanced Computing Centers on the continent.
We talked about it with the Director Antonio Costa, who opened the doors of his Section to tell us better.
Antonio, how long have you been Director of the Bologna Section of INGV?
I have been Director since September 2019, almost 3 years now.
What are the main activities your Section deals with?
Among all those of INGV, the Bologna Section is the Section that carries out the most "various" activities, well representing the three souls of the Institute: the branch dedicated to the study of the Environment, the one dedicated to Earthquakes and the one focused on the study of the Volcanoes.
We have different groups of researchers working in the three Departments and, thanks to the constant interaction between them, we are able to produce multidisciplinary research and studies, transversal to various areas of study and interest: all this represents an important strength for our Section. Let's think, for example, of tsunamis: they are particular and complex phenomena, the study of which requires the collaboration between scientists from very different backgrounds...
How many colleagues work with you in Bologna?
About 70 colleagues, over a dozen research fellows and a couple of fellows.
What does being Director mean to you?
It is a great responsibility, to which I dedicate a lot of my time and a lot of my energy. Being a Section Director implies having to take care of numerous administrative matters, which are naturally far from my training and my scientific passion. However, they are necessary activities to make the Section itself work at its best, so over time I learned to carry them out and today they have become my 'daily bread'.
How is the research you and your colleagues do relevant to citizens' daily lives?
From my point of view, limiting oneself to looking at the direct applications that science can have for the daily life of citizens can be a gamble, in the sense that in doing so one runs the risk of being 'short-sighted' when faced with the many facets and the many levels of study, research and scientific progress (typical, for example, of basic research) which underlie the more easily evident and recognizable applications in our everyday life.
That said, I would say that here in Bologna the dichotomy between these two aspects, i.e. between basic research and applied research, does not exist: we deal with both basic research and products that have an immediate impact on society. Just think of the many colleagues who work on applications related to seismic and volcanic hazards…
What is the most motivating aspect of your job for you?
Do you mean as a researcher or as a Director? (laughs, ed)
Joking aside, what both sides of my work at INGV have in common is, perhaps trivially, the fact that they allow me to deal with science. As Director, of the more managerial aspect of the matter, trying to keep an eye as open as possible to be inclusive and identify the 'weak points' to be strengthened in order to grow the Section as a whole. As a researcher, on the other hand, I find great satisfaction in trying to give answers through my work: on the other hand, what moves us researchers is curiosity. Without that, there is no scientific progress.
What was, in these years as Director, the most important professional episode that you would like to tell?
More than a single and punctual episode, I'd like to refer to what I consider important in this phase of my career, namely the education and training of the new generations. If we don't realize this and don't work to figure out how best to transfer our knowledge to them, there will be no future for science.
Are there any future projects regarding the Bologna Section that you would like to anticipate?
Absolutely yes. I begin by saying that the Bologna section will soon become the first university section of INGV: we have been working for some time to move and integrate, hopefully by next summer, within the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Bologna. It will not be a simple 'move', but it will be a step that will completely change the perspective of integration between us and the academic world. For us, this will also mean being much more in contact with students and PhD students, to train new generations of scientists who can contribute in the future to the advancement of scientific knowledge in our areas of expertise.
Another important milestone that we are about to achieve concerns the Calculation Center that we have recently set up: it has been transferred to the INFN Calculation Center, the CNAF, which, within a year, will merge into what it will be the Bologna Technopole. This Technopole is under construction in the city, in the area of the former Tobacco Factory, and will collect around 80% of the country's computing power and will host Leonardo, one of the most powerful machines in Europe. The ECMWF, the European Center for Medium-Term Weather Forecasts, and the Italian inter-university consortium CINECA (which will have the task of managing Leonardo) have already moved here.
Personally I am very satisfied with these results and with the possibility for the Institute to access these supercomputing resources, also because INGV is part of some European projects in which all of this will be fundamental. I am thinking, for example, of two Projects that I am responsible for for the institute: the European Center of Excellence for Super-computing in Solid Earth Sciences (ChEESE - Center of Excellence for Exascale in Solid Earth, ) for the application of supercomputation to geosciences, and DT-GEO, a European project hinged on the initiatives of Destination Earth () which aims to create digital 'twins' (Digital Twins) of natural phenomena. The ultimate aim is to create a digital twin of the Earth System: it is naturally a very ambitious Project, since it presupposes the ability to capture the functioning of and the interactions between the various complex subsystems that make up our Planet, but the intentions aim exactly in that direction.