ICTP is awarding its 2024 ICTP Prize to two researchers who, although in different fields, exhibit notable creativity in their work.
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.
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.
«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.
More information: https://www.ictp.it/news/2024/12/2024-ictp-prize-announced