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Spirit of Abdus Salam Award

Annual award given by the family of Abdus Salam

The family of Nobel Prize winner Abdus Salam have set up the Spirit of Abdus Salam Award. 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.

Abdus Salam is primarily remembered for his scientific work, but his family wish him to also be remembered for his humility of spirit and humanitarian passion and zeal which ultimately led to the creation of ICTP and TWAS. 

The Award, consisting of a certificate and a cash amount of Euro 1000, recognises those within the extended ICTP family of scientists and non-scientists, and administrative staff alike who have worked tirelessly to further Abdus Salam's humanitarian  passion  and vision for the cooperation, promotion and development of science and technology in the developing  world. This could be shown by an associate, visitor  or professor who has gone beyond the call of duty to try and help fellow students and academics in ICTP or their own country; or members of ICTP or TWAS staff who have gone beyond their duties to assist and support others. Self nominations are discouraged.

In honor of

Abdus Salam

A Nobel laureate known for his humility of spirit and humanitarian passion

ICTP founder Abdus Salam was a Pakistani theoretical physicist and a Nobel Prize laureate, sharing the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg for his contribution to the electroweak unification theory. He was the first Pakistani and the first from an Islamic country to receive a Nobel Prize in science. It was in 1960 at the IAEA's Fourth General Conference that the 34-year-old  Salam suggested the founding of an international theoretical physics institute open to scientists from around the world. That proposal became a reality in 1963 when the General Conference of the IAEA signed an agreement with the Italian Government to establish ICTP in Trieste. The following year, the Centre opened its doors, with Abdus Salam as the Centre's director. 

Nomination

Nominees for the award could be an associate, visitor or professor who has gone beyond the call of duty to try and help fellow students and academics in ICTP or their own country, or a member of ICTP or TWAS staff who again has gone beyond their duties to assist and support others. Self nominations are discouraged.

The Awardees

2024
Rosanna Sain, Luciano Maiani, Fabio Zwirner
2023
Tino Nyawelo, Hugo Celso Perez Rojas, Federico Rosei
2022
Malik Maaza, Concetta Mosca, Adnan Shihab-Eldin
2021
Mohamed Hassan, Gregorio Medrano Asensio, Hilda Cerdeira
2020
M.S. Narasimhan, Erio Tosatti
2019
The ICTP Marie Curie Library, Jacob Palis, Sandro Radicella, Fernando Quevedo
2018
Victor Latorre, Alberto Verjovsky
2017
Imrana Ashraf Zahid, Daniel Gómez, Giancarlo Ghirardi, Muhammad Iqbal
2016
Faheem Hussain, Seifallah Randjbar-Daemi, Galileo Violini
2015
Luciano Bertocchi, Giuseppe Furlan, Yu Lu, Chao-Zheng Zha
2014
Pierre Agbedjro, Anne Gatti, Andre-Marie Hamende