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=== Incident at CERN ===
=== Incident at CERN ===
On 28 September 2018, Strumia gave a presentation at [[CERN]]'s first Workshop on High Energy Theory and Gender that provoked considerable controversy.<ref name="castelvecchi">{{cite news|url=https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06913-0|title=CERN suspends physicist over remarks on gender bias|work=[[Nature (journal)|Nature]]|date=1 October 2018|last=Castelvecchi|first=Davide}}</ref> Citing an analysis he had performed on data from the [[INSPIRE-HEP|InSpire database]],<ref>{{cite arxiv|eprint=1803.10713|last1=Strumia|first1=Alessandro|title=Biblioranking fundamental physics|last2=Torre|first2=Riccardo|class=cs.DL|year=2018}}</ref> he rejected the idea that physics suffers from gender bias against women and claimed that male scientists were victims of discrimination. Strumia cited previous research which points to results commonly referred to as the "Gender Equality Paradox".<ref>{{cite journal|last=Stoet|first=Gijsbert|last2=Geary|first2=David C.|date=1 April 2018|title=The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education|journal=[[Psychological Science]]|volume=29|issue=4|pages=581–593|doi=10.1177/0956797617741719|pmid=29442575}}</ref> Strumia also made a dubious claim that an "unqualified" female physicist took a position that he applied for simply because she was a woman despite the fact that three male physicists were hired for the exact same position. His presentation also contained several false statements including one claiming that the Istanbul Convention states that discrimination against men “shall not be considered discrimination”.<ref>http://www.ac.infn.it/disposizioni/getfile.php?cwdManuale=7800/pdf/&filename=DSP07833.pdf&numero=19849</ref><ref>Letzter, Rafi. “A Physicist Said Women's Brains Make Them Worse at Physics — Experts Say That's 'Laughable'.” Livescience, Oct. 2018, www.livescience.com/63730-physicist-says-women-bad-at-physics.html.</ref>
On 28 September 2018, Strumia gave a presentation at [[CERN]]'s first Workshop on High Energy Theory and Gender that provoked considerable controversy.<ref name="castelvecchi">{{cite news|url=https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06913-0|title=CERN suspends physicist over remarks on gender bias|work=[[Nature (journal)|Nature]]|date=1 October 2018|last=Castelvecchi|first=Davide}}</ref> Citing an analysis he had performed on data from the [[INSPIRE-HEP|InSpire database]],<ref>{{cite arxiv|eprint=1803.10713|last1=Strumia|first1=Alessandro|title=Biblioranking fundamental physics|last2=Torre|first2=Riccardo|class=cs.DL|year=2018}}</ref> he rejected the idea that physics suffers from gender bias against women and claimed that male scientists were victims of discrimination. Strumia cited previous research which points to results commonly referred to as the "Gender Equality Paradox".<ref>{{cite journal|last=Stoet|first=Gijsbert|last2=Geary|first2=David C.|date=1 April 2018|title=The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education|journal=[[Psychological Science]]|volume=29|issue=4|pages=581–593|doi=10.1177/0956797617741719|pmid=29442575}}</ref> Strumia also made a dubious claim that an "unqualified" female physicist took a position that he applied for simply because she was a woman despite the fact that three male physicists were hired for the exact same position.


He was immediately suspended from working for CERN.<ref name="BBCsuspended"/> CERN removed the slides of Strumia's presentation from its conference website, stating that "CERN considers the presentation delivered by an invited scientist during a workshop as highly offensive and supports the many members of the community that have expressed their indignation". They also state that "[CERN] is a place where everyone is welcome, and all have the same opportunities, regardless of ethnicity, beliefs, gender or sexual orientation.<ref name="guardian">{{cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/01/physics-was-built-by-men-cern-scientist-alessandro-strumia-remark-sparks-fury|title='Physics was built by men': Cern suspends scientist over remarks|last1=Giuffrida|first1=Angela|last2=Busby|first2=Mattha|work=[[The Guardian]]|date=1 October 2018|accessdate=2 October 2018}}</ref><ref name="telegraph">{{cite news|url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/01/italian-professors-speech-removed-cern-website-accused-sexism/|title=Italian lecturer suspended by CERN for 'physics invented by men' speech|last=McKenna|first=Josephine|work=[[The Daily Telegraph]]|date=1 October 2018|accessdate=1 October 2018}}</ref> Strumia has complained that science is "becoming sexist against men". [[Jessica Wade]], a physicist at [[Imperial College, London]] who spoke at the same workshop, rebuked Strumia's claims,<ref name="guardian"/><ref name="telegraph"/> saying they have "long been discredited"<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-45703700|title=Cern scientist: 'Physics built by men – not by invitation'|last=Ghosh|first=Pallab|website=bbc.co.uk|publisher=[[BBC News]]|date=1 October 2018|accessdate=2 October 2018}}</ref> and comparing them to James Damore's controversial memo "[[Google's Ideological Echo Chamber]]".<ref>{{cite news|title=Top CERN Scientist Suspended for Presentation That Argued There Is No Sexism in Physics|url=https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a38jjz/head-cern-scientist-suspended-for-presentation-that-argued-there-is-no-sexism-in-physics|work=[[Vice (magazine)|Vice]]|date=1 October 2018|last=Oberhaus|first=Daniel|accessdate=2 October 2018}}</ref> CERN suspended Strumia from his "invited scientist" position pending further investigation and both the University of Pisa and the [[European Research Council]] announced the opening of ethics investigations into his conduct.<ref name="castelvecchi"/>
He was immediately suspended from working for CERN.<ref name="BBCsuspended"/> CERN removed the slides of Strumia's presentation from its conference website, stating that "CERN considers the presentation delivered by an invited scientist during a workshop as highly offensive and supports the many members of the community that have expressed their indignation". They also state that "[CERN] is a place where everyone is welcome, and all have the same opportunities, regardless of ethnicity, beliefs, gender or sexual orientation.<ref name="guardian">{{cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/01/physics-was-built-by-men-cern-scientist-alessandro-strumia-remark-sparks-fury|title='Physics was built by men': Cern suspends scientist over remarks|last1=Giuffrida|first1=Angela|last2=Busby|first2=Mattha|work=[[The Guardian]]|date=1 October 2018|accessdate=2 October 2018}}</ref><ref name="telegraph">{{cite news|url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/01/italian-professors-speech-removed-cern-website-accused-sexism/|title=Italian lecturer suspended by CERN for 'physics invented by men' speech|last=McKenna|first=Josephine|work=[[The Daily Telegraph]]|date=1 October 2018|accessdate=1 October 2018}}</ref> Strumia has complained that science is "becoming sexist against men". [[Jessica Wade]], a physicist at [[Imperial College, London]] who spoke at the same workshop, rebuked Strumia's claims,<ref name="guardian"/><ref name="telegraph"/> saying they have "long been discredited"<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-45703700|title=Cern scientist: 'Physics built by men – not by invitation'|last=Ghosh|first=Pallab|website=bbc.co.uk|publisher=[[BBC News]]|date=1 October 2018|accessdate=2 October 2018}}</ref> and comparing them to James Damore's controversial memo "[[Google's Ideological Echo Chamber]]".<ref>{{cite news|title=Top CERN Scientist Suspended for Presentation That Argued There Is No Sexism in Physics|url=https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a38jjz/head-cern-scientist-suspended-for-presentation-that-argued-there-is-no-sexism-in-physics|work=[[Vice (magazine)|Vice]]|date=1 October 2018|last=Oberhaus|first=Daniel|accessdate=2 October 2018}}</ref> CERN suspended Strumia from his "invited scientist" position pending further investigation and both the University of Pisa and the [[European Research Council]] announced the opening of ethics investigations into his conduct.<ref name="castelvecchi"/>

Revision as of 03:46, 4 October 2018

Alessandro Strumia
Born (1969-12-26) 26 December 1969 (age 54)
Alma materUniversity of Pisa
Awards1996 "Giorgio Gamberini" prize for the PhD thesis "Supersymmetric unification"
Scientific career
FieldsNeutrinos – Leptogenesis – Flavour physics – Electroweak precision physics – Vacuum Decay – Cosmology – Dark matter
Thesis Supersymmetric unification (1995)
Doctoral advisorRiccardo Barbieri

Alessandro Strumia (born 26 December 1969)[1] is a physicist of the University of Pisa.

Education

Strumia obtained his PhD in 1995 at the University of Pisa, where his doctoral advisor was Riccardo Barbieri. His thesis was titled "Supersymmetric unification".[1]

Career

Strumia has been described as being a "hot shot professional" within the physics community.[2] His research specialization is in physics beyond the Standard Model.[1] He joined CERN's theory division as a fellow in 2000, and as a member of the CMS Collaboration, he was a credited coauthor on the paper which announced the Higgs boson discovery; his primary affiliation was Estonia's National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics.[3] Along with Joseph Lykken and other collaborators, he later proposed the "modified naturalness" hypothesis for the Higgs boson's mass.[4]

After the OPERA experiment reported an observation of neutrinos apparently traveling faster than light, Strumia in collaboration with Gian Giudice and Sergey Sibiryakov showed that superluminal neutrinos would imply some anomalies in the velocities of electrons and muons as a result of quantum-mechanical effects. Such anomalies could be already ruled out from existing data on cosmic rays, thus contradicting the OPERA results.[5][6]

While at CERN in June 2018, Strumia and Riccardo Torre worked on a new set of algorithms with which to evaluate the impact of published scientific research. Basing their investigation on the indices used by Google, they proposed a similar system of ranking scientific output. According to commentators, their conclusions were "intriguing", but possibly subject to "transparency issues".[7] Their field of research has been described as significant, owing to the "simplicity" of current methods of evaluation, which cannot cope with the quantity of research being published at the time. The difference in Strumia and Torres' approach is that they include what they describe as "second-generation" citations in their algorithms. Therefore, not only the original citations of the work are taken into account, but subsequent citations to derivative material also. They named their system PaperRank, in acknowledgement of the influence of Google's PageRank on their work.[7]

Incident at CERN

On 28 September 2018, Strumia gave a presentation at CERN's first Workshop on High Energy Theory and Gender that provoked considerable controversy.[8] Citing an analysis he had performed on data from the InSpire database,[9] he rejected the idea that physics suffers from gender bias against women and claimed that male scientists were victims of discrimination. Strumia cited previous research which points to results commonly referred to as the "Gender Equality Paradox".[10] Strumia also made a dubious claim that an "unqualified" female physicist took a position that he applied for simply because she was a woman despite the fact that three male physicists were hired for the exact same position.

He was immediately suspended from working for CERN.[11] CERN removed the slides of Strumia's presentation from its conference website, stating that "CERN considers the presentation delivered by an invited scientist during a workshop as highly offensive and supports the many members of the community that have expressed their indignation". They also state that "[CERN] is a place where everyone is welcome, and all have the same opportunities, regardless of ethnicity, beliefs, gender or sexual orientation.[12][13] Strumia has complained that science is "becoming sexist against men". Jessica Wade, a physicist at Imperial College, London who spoke at the same workshop, rebuked Strumia's claims,[12][13] saying they have "long been discredited"[14] and comparing them to James Damore's controversial memo "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber".[15] CERN suspended Strumia from his "invited scientist" position pending further investigation and both the University of Pisa and the European Research Council announced the opening of ethics investigations into his conduct.[8]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c "CV: Alessandro Strumia". Estonian Research Information System. Retrieved 2 October 2018.
  2. ^ Jackson, Marie; Scott, Jennifer (3 October 2018). "Women in science: 'We want to be accepted into the club'". bbc.co.uk. BBC News. Retrieved 3 October 2018.
  3. ^ "Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC". Physics Letters B. 716 (1): 30–61. 17 September 2012. arXiv:1207.7235. Bibcode:2012PhLB..716...30C. doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2012.08.021.
  4. ^ Wolchover, Natalie (1 June 2013). "New Physics Complications Lend Support to Multiverse Hypothesis". Scientific American.
  5. ^ Giudice, G. F.; Sibiryakov, S.; Strumia, A. (26 September 2011). "Interpreting OPERA Results on Superluminal Neutrino". Nuclear Physics B. 861 (1): 1–16. arXiv:1109.5682. Bibcode:2012NuPhB.861....1G. doi:10.1016/j.nuclphysb.2012.03.008.
  6. ^ Overbye, Dennis (24 October 2011). "Particles Faster Than the Speed of Light? Not So Fast, Some Say". The New York Times.
  7. ^ a b "New metrics rank physicists and their work". Physics Today. 2018. doi:10.1063/pt.6.1.20180607a.
  8. ^ a b Castelvecchi, Davide (1 October 2018). "CERN suspends physicist over remarks on gender bias". Nature.
  9. ^ Strumia, Alessandro; Torre, Riccardo (2018). "Biblioranking fundamental physics". arXiv:1803.10713 [cs.DL].
  10. ^ Stoet, Gijsbert; Geary, David C. (1 April 2018). "The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education". Psychological Science. 29 (4): 581–593. doi:10.1177/0956797617741719. PMID 29442575.
  11. ^ Cite error: The named reference BBCsuspended was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  12. ^ a b Giuffrida, Angela; Busby, Mattha (1 October 2018). "'Physics was built by men': Cern suspends scientist over remarks". The Guardian. Retrieved 2 October 2018.
  13. ^ a b McKenna, Josephine (1 October 2018). "Italian lecturer suspended by CERN for 'physics invented by men' speech". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 1 October 2018.
  14. ^ Ghosh, Pallab (1 October 2018). "Cern scientist: 'Physics built by men – not by invitation'". bbc.co.uk. BBC News. Retrieved 2 October 2018.
  15. ^ Oberhaus, Daniel (1 October 2018). "Top CERN Scientist Suspended for Presentation That Argued There Is No Sexism in Physics". Vice. Retrieved 2 October 2018.

External links

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