Gendered academia. Inequality and inclusiveness in changing Italian academic governance

In recent decades, deep transformations have been reshaping academia and the research environment. Reforms in funding structures, research assessment, and accountability procedures are still redesigning the practices in academic work, redefining research schedules, and determining relevant effects on scientific career paths. Despite European policies efforts towards the development of more responsible and inclusive research, the processes emerging from these transformations of academic contexts are producing new inequalities and strengthening old ones. New rules in the recruitment and career progression of researchers reduce, in some instances, and intensify, in others the pre-existing gender gaps, with varying impact on researchers, according to their belonging to different cohorts, gender or minority groups, and on universities, according to size and regional contexts. Adopting an intersectional perspective, contributions in this volume focus on gendering processes in Italian academia. Altogether, they succeed in accomplishing a double result: to unveil the gendered character of academic and research practices and to trace emergent paths towards their reshaping into more equitable and inclusive ones

FOOT: a new experiment to measure nuclear fragmentation at intermediate energies

Summary: Charged particle therapy exploits proton or 12C beams to treat deep-seated solid tumors. Due to the advantageous characteristics of charged particles energy deposition in matter, the maximum of the dose is released to the tumor at the end of the beam range, in the Bragg peak region. However, the beam nuclear interactions with the patient tissues induces fragmentation both of projectile and target nuclei and needs to be carefully taken into account. In proton treatments, target fragmentation produces low energy, short range fragments along all the beam range, which deposit a non negligible dose in the entry channel. In 12C treatments the main concern is represented by long range fragments due to beam fragmentation that release their dose in the healthy tissues beyond the tumor. The FOOT experiment (FragmentatiOn Of Target) of INFN is designed to study these processes, in order to improve the nuclear fragmentation description in next generation Treatment Planning Systems and the treatment plans quality. Target (16O and 12C nuclei) fragmentation induced by –proton beams at therapeutic energies will be studied via an inverse kinematic approach, where 16O and 12C therapeutic beams impinge on graphite and hydrocarbon targets to provide the nuclear fragmentation cross section on hydrogen. Projectile fragmentation of 16O and 12C beams will be explored as well. The FOOT detector includes a magnetic spectrometer for the fragments momentum measurement, a plastic scintillator for ΔE and time of flight measurements and a crystal calorimeter to measure the fragments kinetic energy. These measurements will be combined in order to make an accurate fragment charge and isotopic identification. Keywords: Hadrontherapy, Nuclear fragmentation cross sections, Tracking detectors, Scintillating detector