Domenico Elia begins term as ePIC Italy National INFN Coordinator

On November 1st 2024, Domenico Elia (INFN Bari) began his term as the new ePIC Italy National INFN Coordinator. He succeeded Pietro Antonioli (INFN Bologna), who held the position for a three-year term, dating back to when the INFN CSN3 sigla was still known as EIC_NET.

Throughout his career, Domenico has been primarily engaged in relativistic heavy-ion collision physics at CERN, starting with the WA94 experiment at the SPS and currently with the ALICE experiment at the LHC. He is an expert in silicon detectors for charged-particle tracking. The Bari group, to which he belongs, has played a crucial role in testing, assembly, and commissioning of the ALICE Inner Tracking System (ITS), fully based on Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS). The new MAPS under development for the ALICE ITS upgrade for LHC Run 4 (ITS3) will also be utilized in the ePIC Silicon Vertex Tracker (SVT). Within ePIC, Domenico has served effectively as the coordinator of the INFN groups involved in the SVT (Bari, Padova, Pavia, and Trieste). He is currently responsible for the Inner Barrel layers of the SVT and serves as a member of the Election Committee. In addition to his detector expertise, Domenico is a computing specialist. He is a member of the INFN Computing Steering Committee and coordinates the INFN contribution to the FAIR (Future Artificial Intelligence Research) NRRP project funded by the NextGenerationEU program.

It has been a pleasure to work alongside Domenico over the years and, more recently, to facilitate the transition of national responsibilities. On behalf of the entire ePIC Italy community, we extend our best wishes to Domenico for a successful leadership of our EIC adventure over the next three years!

Domenico was unanimously elected to this position by the ePIC Italy group team leaders in May 2024.