Frederick II awards honorary degree to Lilia Alberghina

On Tuesday, June 12, 2012, at 11 a.m., in theAula Magna of the Faculty of Biotechnological Sciences, a ceremony will be held to confer the Honorary Degree in Molecular and Industrial Biotechnology to Professor Lilia Alberghina.

Rector Massimo Marrelli and Dean of the Faculty of Biotechnology, Gennaro Piccialli, will introduce the ceremony; the Laudatio Academica by Professor Emeritus Gennaro Marino will follow.

At 11:30 a.m., Professor Alberghina will deliver her Lectio Magistralis, and at 12 noon the Chancellor will confer the Laurea honoris causa.

From Professor Marino's Laudatio:

The honorary degree that the Magnifico Rettore confers on Professor Alberghina is, after that conferred on Gian Tommaso Scarascia Mugnozza, the second honorary degree to be awarded at the proposal of the Faculty of Biotechnology Sciences to an Italian scholar.

Recalling the norm of the Testo Unico, which in the courtly prose of 1933, reads as follows: "The honorary degree may be conferred only on persons who, by works accomplished or publications made, have come to a deserved reputation for singular expertise in the disciplines of the Faculty for which it is granted," it is with particular pleasure that I am about to illustrate the salient points of Lilia Alberghina's scientific career, the merits for which she enjoys international renown, and the reasons why these merits fit into the teaching and scientific objectives of the faculty.

Lilia Alberghina, currently Professor Emeritus, has been a full professor of biochemistry since 1977, first at theUniversity of Milan and then since 1998 at theUniversity of Milan-Bicocca.

Lilia Alberghina has certainly contributed greatly to the extraordinary success of this very young university, which was born precisely in 1998, for having taken on heavy commitments both in the governance of the university as a member of the ordinating committee, first, and of the board of trustees, later, but above all, in my opinion, for having promoted the establishment of the Department of Biotechnology and Biosciences. For the first time in Italy, a departmental structure, housed in the elegant and linear structure designed by Vittorio Gregotti, takes this name, Biotechnology and Biosciences, a name that clearly indicates its objectives and mission: to combine the "knowledge" of the life sciences with "know-how." Such a conjugation represents a constant in Lilia Alberghina's own scientific profile.

Countless are her participations in committees of the Ministry of Universities and Scientific Research, the National Committee for Biosafety, Biotechnology and Life Sciences, and the Directorate General for Research of the European Commission, both for the establishment of degree programs in Biotechnology and for the design of funding plans for biotechnological research.

Numerous prizes and awards at the national and international level have rewarded Lilia Alberghina's intense scientific activity. I like to mention that last year she was awarded the pres
tigious appointment as a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), that she is a Scholar of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences known as the Accademia dei XL. In 1986 she was awarded the Feltrinelli Prize of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei for Biological Sciences and Applications.

Her involvement in science popularization as an author of biology and biotechnology texts for upper secondary schools is also not insignificant. This is a particularly praiseworthy activity intended to provide the new generations with correct and accurate information on the progress of the biological sciences and their applications also in order to overcome the anti-scientific obscurantism, in my opinion a true form of neo-Luddism, with which our society seems to be increasingly pervaded.

On a scientific level,Alberghina 's path is characterized by the early identification of the theme that will be the center of all his research activity: the control of growth and the cell cycle. His first works on the subject date back to the mid-1960s, which will be addressed on the experimental and theoretical levels with publications in the most important journals of microbiology, biochemistry and even theoretical biology.

This topic over the years will be addressed consistently and with originality of investigation methods, always at the frontier of technologies, on different experimental systems, from simple eukaryote cells (Neurospora and yeast) to mammalian cells in culture.
Lilia Alberghina has played an important pioneering role particularly in the field of Industrial Biotechnology.

It must be remembered that Lilia Alberghina participated in the first ever genome sequencing project, the one on the yeast S . cerevisiae. As can be seen from the number of authors who signed the historic paper in Nature: at that time biology became big science.

The awarding of an honorary degree in Biotechnology to Professor Alberghina is part of an unbroken succession of links between the University of Frederick - with its wealth of great scientific traditions - and theNational Academy of Sciences, which, by statute, has aimed, since its founding in 1782 by the Veronese mathematician Antonio Mario Lorgna, to"report and honor the merit of the scholars of the sciences in Italy and beyond."

I would like to mention the important initiative recently undertaken by Lilia Alberghina for the revitalization of scientific research in our country, which calls for and envisions "a new science policy in italy."(Professor Emeritus Gennaro Marino)

For information:
Aula Magna Faculty of Biotechnology Sciences - via Tommaso De Amicis, 95 Naples

www.scienzebiotecnologiche.unina.it