Member's Zone

Trainees's Zone

SISSA
International School for Advanced Studies

Key Personnel

Prof. Stefano Fantoni, director of SISSA.
Dr. Pietro Greco, co-director of School in Science Communication and project leader of ICS.
Dr. Nico Pitrelli, project manager at School in Science Communication and coordinator of ICS.
Dr. Giancarlo Sturloni, project manager at School in Science Communication and member of ICS.

Institutional profile

The International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), founded in 1978, is a centre for research and postgraduate studies leading to a PhD degree. Initially concentrated around the so-called "hard sciences", SISSA's Sectors have recently raised to explore of groundbreaking interfaces between science and the humanities. Son of this effort is the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Advanced Studies, founded in 1986.
Among the activities of the Laboratory, a special remark goes to the School in Science Communication, a two-year part-time course aimed to provide specialized training in different fields of science communication, such as written, television and on-line journalism, institutional and business communication, traditional and multimedial publishing and museology.
The School at SISSA is the first example of school in science communication in Italy. Since its official recognition in 1994, the School in Science Communication trained about 200 communicators, 90% of whom assert to be currently working in the field of science communication. Alongside of the didactic activity came the research on science communication, which led to the establishment of Innovations in the Communication of Science (ICS) and to the production of the international journal on researches in science communication JCOM (http://jcom.sissa.it).
ICS is actually coordinator of the EU funded project Dotik – European Training for Young Scientists and Museum Explainers. It aims to develop a new training scheme for science animators, that enables them to be better actors in the science and society dialogue.

Selected publications

- Mazzonetto, M., Merzagora, M. and Tola, E., SCIRAB. The role of radio in science communication, Polimetrica, Monza, 2005.
- Pitrelli, N., Manzoli, F. and Montolli, B., "Science in advertising: uses and consumptions in the Italian press", Public Understanding of Science, 15 (2), 2006.
- Sturloni, G., Le mele di Chernobyl sono buone. Mezzo secolo di rischio tecnologico, Sironi, Milan, 2006.