The high energy astrophysics group of the Physics Department of the Ferrara University has been working for many years on several research fields. Some members have been awarded prestigious international prizes, such as the Bruno Rossi Prize (1998) of the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society for "the discovery of the X-ray and optical afterglow of gamma-ray bursts, making possible the solution to the 30 year old problem of fixing the distances to the gamma-ray burst sources". Another prize awarded from the EU was the Descartes Prize (2002) . Still for the results obtained in the gamma-ray burst field, one of us was also awarded the Times Higher Education Supplement "Research Project of the Year" Award (2007) for the pioneering work with the RINGO optical polarimeter instrument deployed on the Liverpool Telescope.

In 2010 the head of our group, prof. Frontera, together with Dr. Enrico Costa (INAF-IASF Rome) has been awarded of the prestigious Fermi prize by the SIF (Italian Society of Physics) for their pioneering work and discoveries with the BeppoSAX satellite, for having finally solved the 30-year old mystery of the distances to the cosmic gamma-ray bursts.

The research activity is divided in several main lines: development of focussing optics for hard X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes based on a Laue lens model; analysis and interpretation of old and current data high-energy missions for X and γ-ray astronomy; theoretical interpretation of low mass X-ray binaries (LMXB) as well as isolated neutron stars with huge magnetic fields (10^14-15 G), known as "magnetars".

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