Ugo Amaldi was born in Rome in 1934 and is an Italian and Swiss citizen. He worked for fifteen years at the Physics Laboratory of the Italian National Health Institute (ISS) and for twenty-five years at CERN, participating in and leading numerous experiments in atomic, nuclear and particle physics.
He made, in particular, significant contributions in 1969 to the opening of a new line of research in atomic physics known as "electron momentum spectroscopy"; in 1973 to the discovery of the rising proton–proton cross-section, using the technique of Roman Pots at the CERN Intersecting Storage Rings; and in 1991 to the evidence for the unification of the fundamental forces, based on novel LEP data (2,000 citations).
Between 1980 and 1993 he was spokesperson of DELPHI — one of CERN's large international collaborations at the LEP electron–positron collider, comprising 500 physicists and engineers from twenty countries.
Some 700 scientific papers (with 47,000 citations and H-index = 102), 6 patents and 6 books document his activities. Over the last forty years, more than 2 million Italian high-school students have studied physics from his textbooks.
Interested since the 1960s in medical physics, in 1992 he created the TERA Foundation, which promotes research in oncological hadron-therapy. Thanks to his initiative, the Italian National Centre for Hadron-therapy (CNAO) opened in Pavia in 2011. To date, almost 6,000 patients have been treated there with beams of protons and carbon ions. Following the ongoing upgrade programme, by 2027 CNAO will be the most comprehensively equipped hadron-therapy centre in the world.
In 2023 he founded in Geneva the Tera-Care Foundation, which collaborates with CERN on the design of two medical facilities of interest to Swiss and European hospitals. The first, the Clinical Helium Facility (CHEF), will treat solid tumours with proton and helium-ion beams. The second, the Systemic Hadron-therapy with Alpha Radioisotopes Platform (SHARP), is devoted to the production of radioisotopes and the preparation of radiopharmaceuticals for the Targeted Radionuclide Therapy of disseminated metastases.
Amaldi has been full professor of Medical Physics at the University of Milan. He is Doctor honoris causa of the Universities of Helsinki, Lyon, Valencia and Uppsala, Distinguished Affiliated Professor at the Technische Universität München (TUM), and member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the Italian Academy of Sciences (Accademia dei Quaranta), the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. In 2025 he was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic by the President of the Republic.
