Oscar Sala

Who was Oscar Sala?

Oscar Sala, Italian-Brazilian nuclear physicist and important scientific leader, Emeritus Professor of the Institute of Physics, University of São Paulo.

Sala graduated in physics in 1943, at the then recently created University of São Paulo, in São Paulo, Brazil. The Department of Physics of the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters was started with two imminent Italian physicists, Gleb Wataghin and Giuseppe Occhialini, who specialized in researching cosmic radiation. He was contemporary with a brilliant generation of young Brazilian physicians, such as César Lattes, José Leite Lopes, Mário Schenberg, Roberto Salmeron, Marcelo Damy de Souza Santos and Jayme Tiomno. While still a student, Oscar Sala started research work with the group. In 1945, Sala published with Wataghin an important paper on showers of penetrating nuclear particles.

Soon after graduation, he was hired as a teaching assistant by the Chair of General and Experimental Physics, led by Prof. Marcelo Damy de Souza Santos. His entire scientific and teaching career was spent at the same institution, which later became the Institute of Physics. In this new capacity, Sala became head of the Department of Nuclear Physics.