Departures of note

Gianpaolo Bellini was an Italian physicist and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Milan, as well as an emeritus scientist of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN). Born in Milan in 1935, he spent much of his career at the university and at CERN, where he led joint Milan-INFN groups and contributed to high-energy physics, including pioneering work on active silicon targets and micro-vertex detectors that enabled early measurements of charmed hadron lifetimes.

From 1990 he conceived, designed and led the Borexino experiment at the INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratories, serving as its spokesperson until 2012. Under his guidance Borexino achieved precision spectroscopy of solar neutrinos, including the first direct observation of neutrinos from the CNO cycle, and became the first experiment to detect geo-neutrinos produced by radioactive decay inside the Earth. These results were recognized among the Top Ten Breakthroughs of the Institute of Physics in 2014 and 2020.

Bellini received the Bruno Pontecorvo Prize in 2016 and the Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society in 2017. He also founded the international ISAPP school of astroparticle physics and the Physics in Collision conference series. He died on 12 August 2026 at his home in Foresto Sparso, aged 91.