2024 ICTP Prize Announced

ICTP is awarding its 2024 ICTP Prize to two researchers who, although in different fields, exhibit notable creativity in their work.

Ranjan Laha, an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India, has received the prize for his outstanding and wide-ranging work in theoretical particle astrophysics and cosmology. In particular, Laha has invented creative methods to search for various dark matter candidates and signatures of physics beyond the standard model of particle physics. By applying his methods to astrophysical data, such as IceCube neutrinos, Tibet As Experiment gamma rays, Event Horizon telescope images of Sagittarius A*, or the James Webb Space Telescope's high redshift galaxies, he has made a major impact on this important and developing topic.

Enzo Tagliazucchi, professor of computational neuroscience at the University of Buenos Aires and principal researcher at the Latin American Brain Institute at Santiago, Chile, shares the 2024 ICTP Prize for his significant insights in human cognition and consciousness based on general theoretical principles, validated on empirical data from neural recordings according to the established standards of cognitive neuroscience. Tagliazucchi's research provided a quantitative language to address elusive concepts in neuroscience, providing quantitative measures for consciousness based on dynamic principles and on the complexity of models that reproduce data recorded in subjects in different conditions. His research also contributed to Machine Learning and to exploring how socioeconomic conditions may drive pathological neural disorders.

"The scientific outlook and research fields of these two young researchers, vastly different as they are, are united by important tracts," said Erio Tosatti, chair of the ICTP Prize selection committee, adding, "The first, is to show how theoretical physics can ingeniously and unexpectedly unlock secrets of nature ranging from arcane dark matter signatures to equally  arcane dynamical principles in consciousness. The other, and most important, is that creativity has no boundaries."

A Prize ceremony will be held sometime in 2025.

Prize honouring the past

Each year, the ICTP Prize is given in honour of a scientist who has made outstanding contributions to the field in which the prize is given. The 2024 ICTP Prize is dedicated to the memory of Freeman Dyson, a theoretical physicist and mathematician known for his works ranging from quantum field theory and astrophysics to the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, and whose eminently deep and creative work accompanied and shaped theoretical physics of the second part of the last century.

About the ICTP Prize

The ICTP Prize was created in 1982. It recognizes young scientists from developing countries who work and live in those countries and who have made outstanding and original contributions to physics. For further details, see the ICTP Prize webpage.