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.

Mario is undoubtely one of the pioneers in the research in Cosmology and Gravitation in Brazil. After earning his PhD in the University of Genève (with Professor Josef Maria Jauch as advisor), he spent a year as a post-doc in Cambridge, in the group led by Professor Dennis Sciama. He returned to Brazil in 1972, and settled at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas (CBPF), thus taking the first step of what would become the first research group in Brazil devoted to Gravitation and Cosmology. Since then he has tirelessly worked in scientific research and as a mentor, academically advising 44 MSc and PhD students. Mario received an Honoris Causa degree from the University of Lyon (France) in 2004, and was appointed "Cesare Lattes" Professor of the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics - ICRANet - in 2009. He has organized (every two years, since 1978) the Brazilian School of Cosmology and Gravitation, along with other conferences and workshops dealing with different areas of Cosmology and Gravitation. Among the most relevant we can mention the Workshop on Analog Models of General Relativity (the first of its kind, in 2000), and the X Marcel Grossmann Meeting on General Relativity (in 2003), which brought to Rio de Janeiro more than 600 cosmologists, relativists and astrophysicists from different countries. It is fair say that virtually every researcher working in Brazil in Gravitation and Cosmology has benefited from Mario's initiatives. Already in his first publications Mario showed his creative way of searching new paths to solve problems in the areas of Cosmology, Gravitation, and Astrophysics. This feature was highlighted in the book "Key Problems of Physics and Astrophysics" by Prof. V. L. Ginzburg in 1974, in relation to the article "The Cosmological Dependence of Weak Interactions" [1], by Mario Novello and Pietro Rotelli. In fact, one of the distinctive features of Mario's trajectory is precisely the pursuing of knowledge from a very personal angle, many times not influenced by mainstream tendencies. This was exemplified in 1979 (less than 10 years after the publication of the singularity theorems by Hawking and Penrose) when Mario published, along with J. Salim, the first analytic nonsingular solution of a cosmological model displaying a bounce [2]. He developed later several aspects of nonsingular cosmological models, some of which are reviewed in the article "Bouncing Cosmologies" [3], in collaboration with S. Perez Bergliaffa. Mario has also contributed to other areas of Cosmology and Gravitation, such as the building of alternative theories of gravitation and analog models of General Relativity, and the theory of cosmological perturbations. His work amounts to almost 200 publications in international peer-reviewed journals [4]. Mario has also devoted a lot of time to the popularization of science, with more than five books published (both in Brazil and abroad), and many talks in universities, and radio and TV shows. [1] M.Novello e P. Rotelli, J. Phys. A. Gen. Phys. 5, 1488, (1972). [2] M. Novello e J. M. Salim, Phys. Rev.D 20, 377, (1979). [3] M. Novello e S. E. P. Bergliaffa, Physcs Reports 463, 127, 2008. [4] The complete CV of Prof. Novello can be downloaded from http://lattes.cnpq.br/5205000061462210.