STRONG-2020, the new European project at the forefront of strong interaction studies, financed with 10 million euros, has just appointed IGFAE researcher and USC professor Elena G. Ferreiro as president of its governing board. It will be in charge of the direction, coordination and supervision of the activities included in this project that involves 44 international institutions.

Included into the Horizon2020 program, the objective of STRONG-2020 is to address the theoretical and experimental open questions about the strong nuclear force, the mechanism responsible for keeping the protons and neutrons together inside the atomic nucleus. This field of study attract a community of 2,500 researchers from 36 European countries working with particle colliders that require continuous developments in detectors, data acquisition systems, beams and targets, as well as an adequate theoretical framework to analyze the experimental results.

Within the Spanish groups involved in STRONG-2020, IGFAE is one of the centers with a leadership role. Apart from Elena G. Ferreiro, IGFAE director and researcher Carlos Salgado participates in his organization through the Steering Committee, while Nestor Armesto coordinates one of the work areas, dedicated to deep inelastic dispersion (DIS) studies at the LHC and future experiments.

Elena G. Ferreiro is author of more than 265 articles with more than 16,000 citations, and is member of Nuclear Physics Division’s Board of the European Physical Society and collaborates with leading groups at the IPN Orsay (Institut de Physique Nucléaire) and École Polytechnique. At IGFAE, she is convener of one of the three strategic research areas: “The Standard Model to the limits”.