Hector was born in Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 1933. He got his first degree at the University of Buenos Aires in 1956 and continued his studies at Columbia University where he got his PhD in 1962 (advisor R.Sperber). Hector was a postdoctoral fellow at Orsay (Paris, France) until 1966 when he joined the Department. He got tenure in 1971 and became a Professor in 1976. In 1987 he accepted a Chair at the University of Uppsala (Sweden) .
started his scientific carreer working on the “bootstrap” program to which he made lasting contributions. He took an active part in the development of the Nonrelativistic Quark Model.
Immediately after his arrival to the Department he was joined by the young scientists M. Virasoro and G. Veneziano with whom he created a research group of exceptional quality. Together (also in collaboration with M. Ademollo from the University of Florence, Italy) they initiated an in-depth study of the Dolen-Horn-Schmid duality. This project culminated with the extremely influential paper of G. Veneziano which laid the foundations of String Theory.This work of Hector and his group presents one of the major achievements of the Department. Another line of pioneering research with the same group was the study of compositeness, an important concept in Quantum Field Theory. Hector got interested in Astroparticle Physics and Cosmology very early and his work on primordial magnetic fields is of lasting importance in the field.
Hector had a very important role in the Department influencing the development of various research directions. Establishing the curriculum of the graduate studies in Physics is another of Hector’s achievements, the framework he initiated being followed to these very days.
Hector’s wide interests were reflected in the primordial role he played in scientific publishing: he was the Senior Editor for many years of Nuclear Physics B and after that he became the Scientifc Director of JHEP the leading journal of the field.