The international symposium to celebrate Professor Mário Novello's 70th birthday will be held at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas (CBPF), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from August 15 to August 17, 2012.

Professor Mário Novello Professor Novello was born in 1942 in the city of Rio de Janeiro. He graduated at University of Brasilia in 1965 and obtained his MSc degree in 1968 at CBPF (Brazilian Center of Research on Physics) under the supervision of professor José Leite Lopes, one of the founders of the research center and one of the most renowned Brazilian physicists at that time. Novello decided to pursue his PhD at University of Genève under the supervision of Professor Josef Maria Jauch and presented his thesis entitled "Algebre de l'espace-temps" in 1972. In 1976, Novello created the Cosmology and Gravitation group at CBPF, establishing for the first time a systematic research on cosmology in Brazil. Along the years, his students became collaborators that helped him to spread the development on cosmology and gravitation all over the country founding new groups and increasing the number of good physicists working on the area. Already in 1979, Novello constructed the first bounce cosmological model with an analytical solution, being one of the forerunners in the study of non-singular cosmological models nowadays so much appreciated. Awards and Titles In 1976, Mário Novello received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Natural Sciences for his contributions on Astronomy and Astrophysics. In 2004, Novello was granted a degree Honoris Causa from University of Lyon, France, due to his studies on non-singular cosmological models, and in 2008, he became Cesare Lattes ICRANet Chair on the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics (ICRANet, Pescara and Rome, Italy).