The Ivano Bertini Award recognises a significant achievement in frontier research that utilises an integrative structural biology approach.
The Award of €15,000 is endowed by Bruker BioSpin which, together with Ivano, developed NMR instrumentation to broaden its application and increase measurement sensitivity.
Ivano will long be remembered for building a world-class laboratory. When starting out in 1989, he had only two NMR spectrometers (200 and 600 MHz), housed in a former church in central Florence that featured sixteenth-century Renaissance frescos on walls with vaulted ceilings. By 1999, there was no room for new spectrometers, so he founded the Center for Magnetic Resonance (CERM; http://www.cerm.unifi.it) and moved to become the first occupant of the new science campus of the University of Florence. (The CERM was recognized as a center of excellence by the university in 2003.) Today, in a building of about 1,600 square meters, scientists have access to an impressive collection of NMR instruments for solution and solid-state NMR experiments guided by a team of outstanding scientists. A man with seemingly infinite energy, Ivano founded two biotech companies, served as president of the Italian Chemical Society and cofounded the European network on NMR facilities for bio-NMR. His lab has been funded by the European Commission as an NMR infrastructure site since 1994 and as a computational 'e-infrastructure' site since 2007. In 2008, CERM became one of only seven core labs of Instruct.
Nature Structural & Molecular Biology 19, 868–869 (2012)
