Roberto D. Graglia
Rodolfo S. Zich, professor emeritus at Politecnico di Torino, Italy, passed away on 8 May 2023, at the age of 83, after a long illness.
Prof. Zich was the rector of Politecnico di Torino from 1987 to 2001, where he was a full professor of electromagnetic fields and circuits in the Department of Electronics until his retirement in 2011. Among his many honors, he was elected a member of the Accademia Delle Scienze di Torino in 1987 and an Honorary Member of IEEE in 2016.
He was the head of numerous prestigious institutional and entrepreneurial offices. He was extraordinary commissioner of the Galileo Ferraris National Electronic Institute from 1991 to 1993 and a member of the board of directors of the École Polytechnique de Paris from 1997 to 2001. From 1999 to 2003, he was president of CSELT, the research center of the Italian telephone company, during the period of its transformation into TILab, and later, he was the director of the Telecom Italia Mobile joint stock company from 2001 to 2005. He was president of the Torino Wireless Foundation (now Piemonte Innova), which he founded in 2002 to promote information and communications technology innovation in Turin and Piedmont, and president and founder of the Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, now the Links Foundation. He was president of the NETTUNO consortium, the first Italian telematic university, now UniNettuno University, and vice president of the supervisory board of Intesa Sanpaolo Bank from 2006 to 2010. Furthermore, his contribution in the 1990s to the reform of university studies in Italy was notable, and his role in promoting digital innovation was extremely important, so much so that he held the position of president of the Italian Association for Informatics and Automatic Calculation from 2010 to 2013.
His contributions to the development of Politecnico di Torino during the years of his rectorship and beyond were fundamental, thanks, above all, to the conception and implementation of the new “Cittadella Politecnica” (“Polytechnic Citadel”), which resulted in doubling the size of the Politecnico. This achievement placed the Politecnico at the center of Turin city life and played a fundamental role in the postindustrial urban restructuring of the city of Turin, contributing to its transformation into a city dedicated to innovation and research. Several start-ups and the Innovative Enterprise Incubator (I3P) are, in fact, based in the “Cittadella Politecnica.” The I3P was founded in 1999, during the rectorate of Prof. Zich, and is now the best public incubator in the world, as established by the 2019–2020 “UBI World Rankings of Business Incubators and Accelerators.”
Among other things, we cannot forget that Prof. Zich was also the founder and president of the steering committee, on an ongoing basis, of the International Conference on Electromagnetics in Advanced Applications, which is well known to many members of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society and whose first edition dates back to 1989.
The solemn greeting to the coffin of Prof. Zich was addressed on 10 May 2023, in the courtyard of honor of Politecnico di Torino, by his family members; Rector Prof. Guido Saracco; Prof. Stefano Lo Russo, mayor of the city of Turin; former Rector Prof. Francesco Profumo, president of the Compagnia di San Paolo Foundation and former minister of university and research; Prof. Marco Mezzalama, president of the Links Foundation and vice president of the Academy of Sciences of Turin; and all academic authorities and many of his former students.
All those who had the privilege of sharing part of their professional career with Prof. Zich are immensely grateful to him for his inspired guidance and friendship. His numerous former students join all of the members of the Politecnico di Torino Applied Electromagnetics research group in expressing their deepest condolences to his family and friends.
Roberto D. Graglia (roberto.graglia@polito.it) is the 2015 past president of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society. He is a Life Fellow of IEEE.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MAP.2023.3281988