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Francesca Ferlaino (Photo: Martin Vandory)

Experimental physicist Francesca Ferlaino was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in September. With the Fellowship, the members of the Society honor outstanding scientific achievements of their colleagues. The outstanding work of the physicist was just recently honored with the Junior BEC Award in Spain.

The American Physical Society (APS) has honored Francesca Ferlaino for “ground-breaking experiments on dipolar quantum gases of erbium atoms, including the attainment of quantum degeneracy of bosons and fermions, studies on quantum-chaotical scattering, the formation of quantum droplets, and investigations on the roton spectrum.” And only recently, the physicists led by Francesca Ferlaino, simultaneously with a German and an Italian team, discovered supersolidity in dipolar quantum gases.

The APS Fellowship is a distinct honor signifying recognition by professional peers. Each year, no more than one half of one percent of the Society’s membership is recognized by their peers for election to the status of Fellow of the American Physical Society. With Francesca Ferlaino, Rainer Blatt, Rudolf Grimm and Peter Zoller, all scientific directors at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Innsbruck are now Fellows of the American Physical Society. The American Physical Society, with over 40,000 members worldwide, is one of the most eminent associations in physics.

Francesca Ferlaino, born in 1977, began her study in physics at the University Federico II of Naples, where she received her master in 1998. In 2004, she received her doctoral degree from the University of Florence and LENS. She joined Innsbruck in 2007 as post-doc and Lise-Meitner fellow to work in the group of Rudolf Grimm until she became appointed as Professor at the University of Innsbruck and Scientific Director at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in 2014.