It was a fitting setting for two married Italian scientists who wanted to become U.S. citizens. At Thursday’s opening of the new U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Albuquerque, Milena Veneziani and Gennaro D’Angelo took the oath and became naturalized citizens. They both work at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

And Thursday’s ceremony was held in a room that was dedicated the same day to another Italian scientist with a LANL connection: Enrico Fermi. Fermi was an Italian immigrant who became an American citizen – and a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. He worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos and is regarded as “the architect of the Atomic Age.”