Since 1982, the ICTP Prize recognises young scientists from developing countries who have made remarkable and original contributions to physics.

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 2023 ICTP Prize is in honour of Sir. Robert McCredie May, Baron May of Oxford, for his ground-breaking contributions to theoretical ecology based on insights from theoretical physics.

ICTP will celebrate the two winners of the 2023 ICTP Prize with a ceremony on Wednesday, 28 August at 14:00 in the Budinich Lecture Hall.

The two recipients - Prof. Mohit Kumar Jolly of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and Prof. Xinan Zhou of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Sciences (KITS), University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), Beijing, and ShanghaiTech University - share the Prize for their remarkable and novel contributions to their respective fields, by developing new mathematical and computational methods with approaches rooted in theoretical physics.

Prof. Mohit Kumar Jolly, of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, receives the 2023 ICTP Prize for his innovative contributions to understanding the emergent dynamics of cellular transitions during cancer metastasis and therapeutic resistance, and for unraveling the latent design principles of cellular networks that can determine a cell's fate.

Prof. Jolly will give a talk titled 'Design principles of complex cellular decision-making networks in cancer', which abstract is as follows:

Elucidating the design principles of regulatory networks driving cellular decision-making is of fundamental importance in mapping and controlling cellular behaviour. Despite their size and complexity, large biological regulatory networks often lead to a limited number of cell-states/phenotypes. How this canalization is achieved remains largely elusive. Here, we investigated multiple different networks governing cell-state transition during cancer metastasis, and identified a latent design principle in their topology that limits their phenotypic repertoire – the presence of two “teams” of nodes engaging in a mutually inhibitory feedback loop. These "teams" are specific to these networks and directly shape the phenotypic landscape and consequently the cell-fate trajectories. Our analysis reveals that network topology alone can contain information about phenotypic distributions it can lead to, thus obviating the need to simulate them. We present experimental evidence of such "teams" in transcriptomic datasets across many contexts (cancer cell plasticity in breast cancer, melanoma, lung cancer etc.). Overall, we propose these “teams” as a network design principle that drive cell-fate canalization in diverse decision-making processes, and drastically reduce the dimensionality of the phenotypic space.

Prof. Xinan Zhou, of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Sciences (KITS), University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), Beijing, and ShanghaiTech University, is awarded the 2023 ICTP Prize for his novel and outstanding contributions leading to new techniques to compute correlation functions in conformal field theories in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence, and for developing new approaches to the analytic conformal bootstrap.

Prof. Zhou will give a talk on 'Holographic correlators from analytic bootstrap', which abstract is as follows:

The AdS/CFT correspondence allows us to study, at least in principle, strongly coupled conformal field theories in an analytic fashion using only perturbation theory. However, there is a still long way to go to harness the full computational power of this correspondence. In particular, it is technically very challenging to compute holographically correlation functions in CFTs which are the most basic observables. In this lecture, I will discuss a modern program of computing correlation functions in holographic CFTs which is based on the idea of bootstrap. We will see how symmetry and consistency conditions become a powerful organizing principle and allow us to bypass many difficulties of the traditional method, obtaining results which are otherwise impossible to get. The bootstrap philosophy also helps to uncover surprising underlying simplicity in these objects, as well as rich mathematical structures.

The 2023 ICTP Prize award ceremony will be followed by the Diploma Graduation Ceremony during which the Qaisar and Monika Shafi Prize for the best diploma student of the year will be awarded.

The ceremony is open to all and will be livestreamed on ICTP's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ICTPchannel/streams

Light refreshments will be served in the lobby in front of the Budinich Lecture Hall after the ceremony.