The ICTP-East African Institute for Fundamental Research (ICTP-EAIFR) has announced the hiring of its first faculty member who will teach in the new institute's masters and PhD programmes in physics.

Physicist Marcello Musso has been appointed as senior lecturer at the institute and will instruct the first cohort of students expected to begin their studies in September 2018.

Musso is a theoretical physicist with research interests in a broad range of subjects in cosmology. He earned a PhD in physics at the University of Pavia, and held postdoctoral positions at ICTP and at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied under the guidance of Physics Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg. He has taught physics at the Politecnico di Milano, ICTP, the University of Louvain, and at ICTP's partner institute in Brazil, the South American Institute for Fundamental Research.