Stories of the 2024 ICTP Diploma Graduates

The ICTP Postgraduate Diploma Programme is a selective and intense one-year programme that prepares talented students from developing countries to start a PhD. Of the some 900 students who apply every year, only 50 are chosen to attend this high-quality, advanced scientific training that will give them access to some of the best postgraduate courses worldwide.

Salim Davila of Venezuela joined the ICTP Postgraduate Diploma Programme to study theoretical high energy physics. “I heard about ICTP and its Diploma Programme  when I started my bachelor’s degree at Universidad de los Andes, six years ago. They have a strong history of collaboration with ICTP, and I got used to finding the ICTP logo on the books that I borrowed at the library, which were sent by the Centre over the years through the ICTP Library donation programme,” he explains. 

When the time came to choose what to do after obtaining his degree, and not knowing exactly what to do afterwards, Davila applied only to ICTP, confident that he had good chances to be accepted. “Because of the strong economic crisis that Venezuela has been going through, the situation at my university is getting increasingly dire. Many professors have left the country and the university does not offer any master’s degree. If I wanted to do a master’s degree, I knew I would have to leave anyway and go to Caracas, or to Brazil, but coming to ICTP would open more doors for me,” he says.

Here you meet people from all over the world, I think this is what makes ICTP so special.

“Coming here was a very big change in my life. I left everything – my family, my friends, my pets. At the beginning, during the first month, I admit I felt a bit lost,” says Davila, who had never left his country before, and it does not take him long to add “but at ICTP I found a group of friends and I am very happy to be here. Here you meet people from all over the world, I think this is what makes ICTP so special.”

Academically, the Programme has been intense. “You don’t have a lot of time to prepare the courses, so you have to process a lot of information in a very short time. It was very fast, compared to what I was used to, and I like to take the time to understand things better,” says Davila, adding, “but all the professors are very nice and were always ready to answer our questions.”

ICTP’s multiculturalism taught me a lot, interestingly also about myself.

“ICTP’s multiculturalism taught me a lot, interestingly also about myself. I have Lebanese origins, which explains my name, but I have never been to Lebanon or met any members of my family from there, so I did not know much about Lebanese culture. Thanks to one of my fellow students in the Programme who is Lebanese, during this year I have learnt a lot about Lebanon. She also told me that I look Lebanese!” says Davila.

Davila's final project is on conformal field theory. “I chose this topic because it has many applications in theoretical physics – it is related to the Standard Model, to statistical physics, to string theory, to quantum field theories – and also because I did not know anything about it and I wanted to study something new,” he explains, adding, “Conformal field theory has more symmetries than usual, for example it is invariant under rescaling, and this makes it a very powerful tool.”

Among the many positive things that Davila found at ICTP in his year as a Postgraduate Diploma student, there’s the fact that at ICTP he could find support and guidance through the application process that helped him be accepted to do a master’s at the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU), in Munich. “That was my first choice, I am very happy,” he says. “My plan is to use this opportunity to learn more mathematics, and then do a PhD in mathematical physics,” he concludes.