Spirit of Salam Awardees 2024 Announced  

When the family of Abdus Salam established an award in his honour, the goal was to celebrate the enduring vision of the ICTP founder by singling out individuals in the ICTP community who have kept Salam's spirit alive.

This year, three people will receive the Spirit of Abdus Salam Award for their longterm dedication to the Centre's scientific excellence and social well-being. The recipients are:

• Rosanna Sain: Rosanna Sain worked for 44 years for the Trieste science community, first as a secretary to ICTP co-founder Paolo Budinich at the Istituto di Fisica Teorica and then for ICTP. Between 2006 and 2023 she was the secretary of ICTP's High Energy, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (HECAP) section; she retired in November 2023. During this period she constantly went beyond her duties to welcome visitors from all over the world and to guarantee the smooth functioning of the HECAP section. Her warm and colourful personality progressively became a reference point at ICTP, a face of the Centre for all the visitors and a constant support for her colleagues in the HECAP section. In her long career she dealt literally with thousands of visitors, and for each one she had a personal touch, improving the quality of each visit to the Centre and the way ICTP is remembered as a home away from home. 
• Luciano Maiani and Fabio Zwirner: Fabio Zwirner was the representative of the Italian Government on the ICTP Steering Committee, as well as its chair, from 2014 to 2022. Luciano Maiani was the chairperson of the ICTP Scientific Council from 2011 to 2022. In their capacity as the Chairs of ICTP's highest governing bodies, Maiani and Zwirner played a very important role at critical junctures. They managed to align, with extraordinary perseverance and skill, the sometimes divergent priorities of the ICTP stakeholders towards the ultimate goal of staying true to the original vision of the Centre as a global hub for advanced science. In his capacity as Vice-President of the European Research Council (ERC), Zwirner tirelessly supported the proposal to include ICTP among the institutions eligible for financial support by the European Union through the ERC programme. Thanks to his efforts the proposal was accepted and ratified by the European Parliament in 2020. Since then ICTP has received more than seven million Euros in competitive research grants from the ERC programme. Under Maiani's leadership, the ICTP Scientific Council has been instrumental in promoting and guiding the expansion of ICTP's research activities into new emerging scientific fields. 

The Spirit of Salam Award Ceremony will take place later in 2024.
 
About the Spirit of Abdus Salam Award
 
The Spirit of Abdus Salam Award may be given to anyone within the extended ICTP family of scientists and non-scientists, and administrative staff alike who can show that they have worked tirelessly to further Abdus Salam's humanitarian passion and vision for the cooperation,  promotion and development of science and technology in the developing  world. For more details, and to see the list of past winners, please visit the Spirit of Abdus Salam Award page.