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 2025 ICTP Prize is dedicated to the memory of Giancarlo Ghirardi, a theoretical physicist whose tireless work on the foundations of quantum mechanics created approaches and indeed a whole  school that anticipated by far the entanglement-based modern quantum information methods. As a long-time collaborator with ICTP, Ghirardi's strong presence at and dedication to the Centre was of immense value to its international community.

ICTP will celebrate the two winners of the 2025 ICTP Prize with a ceremony on Wednesday, 21 October at 14:30 in the Budinich Lecture Hall.

The two recipients - Prof. Titas Chanda, assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and Prof. Sthitadhi Roy, assistant professor at the Tata institute of fundamental research, Bengaluru, (India) - share the award for their exceptional and original contributions to the theory of quantum many-body systems, at the interface of condensed matter and quantum information science. Their work has opened new directions in the understanding of non-equilibrium dynamics of quantum systems, quantum correlations, and measurement-driven phase transitions, including conceptual as well as methodological breakthroughs.

Prof. Titas Chanda receives the 2025 ICTP Prize for his wide-ranging and impactful contributions to quantum information science, quantum many-body physics, and quantum technologies. His research spans foundational aspects of quantum correlations and open quantum systems to applications such as quantum batteries, communication protocols, and resource theories.

Prof. Chanda will present a talk titled 'Deconfined criticality in classical and quantum systems: lessons from frustrated clock models and cluster Ising chains'. He will present a talk exploring two examples of deconfined criticality, one 2D classical and one 1+1D quantum. Through these examples, he will discuss how transitions between phases with incompatible symmetries can be made possible by an emergent symmetry that appears only at criticality. He will argue that this emergent symmetry, rather than any exotic microscopic ingredient, is the essential feature of deconfined criticality in these systems.

Prof. Sthitadhi Roy has received the prize for his outstanding and influential contributions to the non-equilibrium dynamics of quantum many-body systems, particularly his pioneering work on measurement-induced phenomena, many-body localisation, and emergent phases of quantum matter. His research has produced deep insights into the structure of highly excited eigenstates, the role of disorder correlations in stabilizing localisation, and the mechanisms underlying entanglement growth and thermalisation.  

In his presentation titled 'Information scrambling in disordered quantum many-body systems: an eigenstate-correlations perspective' He will present a unified microscopic framework for understanding quantum dynamics in both chaotic and strongly disordered systems. He will explore how correlations among eigenstates can provide insight into information scrambling, entanglement growth, and the different dynamical behaviours that emerge in these systems.