Science is Our Common Language

In 2024 ICTP and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development launched a three-year support programme for advancing the capabilities of Arab researchers and students in science and technology. The programme has helped scientists from the Middle East and Northern Africa to participate in a range of ICTP training and education programmes.

Among the programmes supported by the Arab Fund is the ICTP Associates Programme, created by ICTP founder and Nobel laureate Abdus Salam to allow scientists from the global South to develop and cultivate an international network of collaborations by regularly visiting the Centre.

The ICTP-Arab Fund programme has benefitted 12 associates who have had the possibility to spend one-month visits at ICTP and bring a student with them. The latest videos in the series “Science is Our Common Language” focus on the stories of four of them.

The first ICTP Associate supported by the Arab Fund to be featured in the video series is Farida Fassi, a particle physicist working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN and a full professor of physics at the Faculty of Sciences of  Mohammed V University in Rabat. In 2025, she visited ICTP together with her PhD student, Ahmed Bellagroudi.

The video was created in collaboration with Thomas Gurtner and Walter Stoch of the ICTP Video Team.