The family of Nobel Prize winner Abdus Salam set up the Spirit of Abdus Salam Award ten years ago, in 2014. The award is announced annually on the occasion of the ICTP Salam Distinguished Lectures, held at ICTP during the last week of January to coincide with Abdus Salam's birthday on 29 January.

The Ceremony to honour the recipients of the 2024 Spirit of Abdus Salam Award will take place on Tuesday 17 December 2024 starting at 15:30 hrs in the Budinich Lecture Hall on the ICTP Campus.

The 2024 Award recipients who will be present on this occasion together with Members of the Salam Family 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. 

A detailed feature article on the 2024 Awardees is available here: https://www.ictp.it/news/2024/1/spirit-salam-awardees-2024-announced

The event will be livestreamed www.ictp.it/livestream

After the event, all are invited to an end of the year toast which will take place in the lobby outside the Budinich Lecture Hall to exchange festive greetings together.

All are welcome to attend!