The University of the Republic of Uruguay conferred the Doctorate Honoris Causa to Academy member Giorgio Bernardi in November 2012, in Montevideo. The Minister of Research of Uruguay and the Italian Ambassador participated in the ceremony.

The research activity of prof. Bernardi is centered on genome organization and evolution with special attention to the genome – environment interaction. His research and the neoselectionist theory of genome evolution are presented in the volume ‘Structural and evolutionary genomics: natural selection in genome evolution’ (Elsevier, 2004).

The Faculty of Chemistry, Mathemathics and Physics of Stuttgart University conferred the Doctorate Honoris Causa to Academy member Dante Gatteschi on November 16th, 2012, in recognition of his extraordinary and exceptional scientific and technical discoveries in the field of molecular magnetism.

Dante Gatteschi is one of the leading European inorganic chemists, a worldwide renowned pioneer in the field of molecular magnetism. Among his many research interests, a decisive contribution concerns the discovery of single chain molecular nanomagnets, which led to an exponential development of this research field during the last ten years.