Laura Perini, professor of nuclear and subnuclear physics at the University of Milan and INFN researcher, passed away at the age of 70.
Perini carried out her research activity in the field of Experimental Physics of Elementary Particles. She has taken part and contributed to numerous experiments at CERN, dealing since the early nineties with the design and preparation of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC accelerator, which in 2012 discovered the Higgs boson, together with the CMS experiment. Within the ATLAS collaboration, Laura Perini focused on the computational problems associated with the extraordinary amount of data produced by this experiment. To this purpose she supported the "Grid" distributed computing project, which was eventually adopted and has played a strategic role in the design and evolution of the scientific computing infrastructure of INFN for about twenty years.
She has held many organizational and scientific positions: from 2012 to 2017 she was the Director of the Physics Department "Aldo Pontremoli" and a member of the Academic Senate of the University of Milan, and since 2019 she has also been a member of the Administration Board.
In addition to teaching and scientific activities, Laura Perini has been involved for a long time in the promotion of Physics. She was Responsible of the Scientific Degrees Project (PLS) for the Physics Department of the State University of Milan. This project is funded by MIUR, the Italian Ministry for University and Research, with the aim of encouraging the growth of the interest of high school students towards scientific subjects and physics in particular. Her commitment to improving the preparation of freshmen enrolled in the Physics Department was also relevant.
Chiara Meroni, member of the INFN Executive Council and former director of the Milan Section, recalls: "Laura was a person of great balance and calm and everyone remembers her as an indefatigable person, cheerful and always at work to find the best solutions in any situation", and adds: "Thanks to her vision on the importance of scientific computing and above all of the analysis of large amounts of data, she has been at the forefront of INFN activities in this sector ".
"With Laura, the INFN and the Milan Division lose a colleague of great depth and professionalism, competent and kind, helpful and generous, but above all a friend," recalls Mauro Citterio, director of the INFN Milan Division. "Laura took part in several experiments at CERN (Omega and UA2), she gave important contributions to the design and preparation of the ATLAS experiment. And we owe to her the Italian computing structure of second-level."
