Giovanni Jona-Lasinio - Biography#

Giovanni Jona-Lasinio graduated in physics at the University of Rome in 1956. He then became a researcher at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare and an assistant professor in the physics department of the University of Rome. He was nominated full professor at the University of Padua in 1970, and he returned to the University of Rome in 1974, where he is currently professor emeritus. He has spent several years abroad visiting the University of Chicago, CERN, MIT, IHES and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie.

The research activity of Giovanni Jona-Lasinio in theoretical and mathematical physics concerns a wide spectrum of topics.

He is most widely known for having constructed with Yoichiro Nambu the first model in elementary particle physics with spontaneous symmetry breaking (NJL model), for the first introduction (1969) with Carlo Di Castro of the field-theoretic renormalization group in the study of critical phenomena and for having developed recently a theory of stationary states far from equilibrium.

He has served in scientific committees of the University Paris VI, of the University of Geneva and of the Institut Henri Poincaré, Paris.

He has been a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General, Acta Applicandae Mathematicae; Annales de l’Institut Henri Poincaré (Physique Théorique); Mathematical Physics; Analysis and Geometry; Reviews in Mathematical Physics. Presently, he is a member of the editorial board of ALEA Latin-American Journal of Probability.

He has been organizer of several international conferences, among which the 1977 Rome International Conference in Mathematical Physics M ∩ Φ, and the subsequent conferences of the same series held in Marseille 1986, Swansea 1988, Brisbane 1997, London 2000, Rio de Janeiro 2006.