ISSNAF and Politecnico, a successful collaboration

Celebrations are approaching for the first year of the collaboration between Politecnico and the Italian Scientists & Scholars in North America Foundation (ISSNAF), which officially began with the signing of a cooperation agreement in May 2022.

Founded in 2007 under the auspices of the Italian Embassy in the United States at the initiative of 36 well-known professors and scientists, including four Nobel Laureates, ISSNAF is a non-profit organization that brings together thousands of Italian scientists and academics active in laboratories, universities and research centers in North America. Among the initiatives included in the agreement with the Politecnico for research collaboration and knowledge sharing, one of the most relevant is aimed at promoting the mobility of Italian doctoral students to the most prestigious universities and institutions in the United States.

ISSNAF host members will also support students by sponsoring the costs of university laboratories. In 2023, there will be five top doctoral students doing part of their doctoral studies at Stanford (Davide Celestini, Spacecraft motion optimization, Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering; Anna Mangini, electrochemical synthesis of ammonia, Ph.D. in Materials Science), Duke (Michele Errante, compressible flow modeling, Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering), Cornell (Alberto Paniate, metasurfaces and plane optics, Ph.D. in Physics) and Princeton (Davide L. D. Aschieri, terrestrial water risk management, Ph.D. in civil engineering).

The research topics that these students will explore represent a frontier in some of the most advanced fields of research. Sincere appreciation goes to all the professionals and host professors who made this opportunity possible for Italian students. Politecnico and ISSNAF firmly believe that their collaboration will help strengthen the relationship between institutions on both sides of the Atlantic and will continue to work to strengthen their partnership.

"The internationalization of the Ph.D. program is a salient action among those undertaken by the Doctoral School in application of the Politecnico’s strategic plan and in the interest of our youth, because it allows comparison with other realities and undoubted personal enrichment," stresses Professor Eugenio Brusa, Director of the Doctoral School of the Politecnico “ISSNAF offers with its mentoring action a decisive help in accessing the research circuits of North America and the most prestigious universities, to do research in the context of cutting-edge projects.”