Supported by Chinese Academy of Sciences and invited by Prof. Yubai Pan and Prof Jiang Li, Prof. Anna Vedda visited Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (SICCAS) from October 21 to November 20, 2015. During her visit in SICCAS, both Chinese and Italian sides reached the agreement for long-term collaboration and bilateral-government project in the application of scintillation ceramics.

An award ceremony of the CAS visiting professorships for senior international scientists was held on November 6. Mr. Tianhou He, the head of HR department presided over the ceremony. Prof. Lixin Song, director of SICCAS, presented the certificate to Prof. Anna Vedda and delivered welcome remarks. Prof. Jiang Li introduced Prof. Anna Vedda’s the research backgrounds and achievements.

After the ceremony, Prof. Anna Vedda gave the lecture entitled “Rare-earth incorporation in oxide scintillator crystals, glasses, and nanostructures – Optical emission and beyond”. Rare earth ions (RE) are characterized by a great variety of optical transitions that make them very attractive as luminescent activators in many optical applications. Several insulating oxide materials are considered good hosts for RE ions. After doping, the RE energy levels can lie within the host band-gap and confer an optical activity to otherwise transparent systems. It is shown in this report that, besides optical functionalization, RE incorporation in a host can simultaneously give rise to other modifications (thermodynamic, morphological, and structural) that can be controlled in order to engineer a material for a specific application. The scientific researchers and graduate students in SICCAS had hot discussions with Prof. Anna Vedda. This seminar belonged to one of the Series of activities held by the Key Laboratory of Transparent Opto-functional Inorganic Materials, Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Anna Vedda is a professor of General Physics at the Department of Materials Science of the University of Milano-Bicocca. Her principal fields of interest are the functional properties of luminescent materials also at the nanoscale, with special emphasis on structure-property correlations. Her research is partly devoted to application-oriented topics. Significant results were obtained concerning scintillating fibers for medicine and high energy physics, fluoride and oxide nano-crystals for medical imaging, as well as silicon dioxide-based materials for micro- and opto-electronics. Her experimental activities include radio- and photo-luminescence, wavelength resolved thermo-luminescence, optical absorption, impedance spectroscopy studies, micro-Raman scattering and infrared spectroscopy. She plays an active role in many international collaborations, such as the collaborations with ETH Zurich, the Université Claude Bernard in Lyon, CERN, Czech Academy of Sciences, Universidad Autonoma in Madrid, and Chinese Academy of Sciences. She is the author of more than 200 papers in refereed journals and she is responsible of several domestic and European research projects. She is the member of the scientific board of the Doctorate School in Materials Science and Nanotechnology of the University of Milano-Bicocca and of the European Physics and Chemistry of Advanced Materials European Doctorate (PCAM).

Prof. Lixin Song, director of SICCAS conferred the CAS visiting professorships for senior international scientists’ certificate to Prof. Anna Vedda

Prof. Jiang Li introduced Prof. Anna Vedda’s the research backgrounds and achievements

Group photo with Prof. Anna Vedda