(Jul. 4) - Filippo Frontera, professor of General Physics at the Faculty of Engineering of the Ferrara University, has been awarded one of the three prestigious Marcel Grossmann Awards for Relativistic Astrophysics. The award ceremony took place at the opening of the 13th Marcel Grossmann Meeting, being held in Stockholm. The prof. Frontera has led the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor Project on board the BeppoSAX satellite, which led to the discovery of GRB X-ray afterglows, and to their optical identification. Since his graduation, his main scientific activity has been carried out in X-ray astronomy. For his researches in GRB astronomy he is among the winners of the Descartes Prize 2002 for the Science of the European Union Committee. He is responsible of the High Energy Astrophysics group at the Physics Department of the Ferrara University. His current research activity is observational and experimental. Among the latter activities, one is ambitious: the development of a hard X-ray focusing lens for space astronomy applications, with a first prototype already developed. (Red)

ABOUT FILIPPO FRONTERA
Filippo Frontera is full professor of General Physics at the Faculty of Engineering of the Ferrara University. He is the head of our high-energy astrophysics group. Previously he was researcher of the National Research Council (CNR) at the Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica (INAF), Bologna Section (INAF/IASF-Bo), Bologna where he continues to lead an X-ray astronomy group. Since his graduation, his main scientific activity was carried out in X-ray astronomy. He was PI of the high energy experiment PDS and of the Gamma-Ray Burst Monitor aboard of BeppoSAX satellite. He is among the winners of the 1998 Bruno Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society, for the discovery of the X-ray afterglows from celestial Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs), making possible the measurements of the distances to the cosmic GRBs. He is responsible of the X-ray astronomy group at INAF/IASF-Bo, he is the Co-I of the JEM-X experiment for the INTEGRAL satellite and is responsible for the development of hard X-ray(>10 keV) focusing techniques for space astronomy. He was also awarded of the Descartes Prize 2002 for the Science of the European Committee, as well as of the Fermi Prize 2010 by the Italian Society of Physics (SIF) for his breakthrough discoveries with BeppoSAX.