First winner of the ICTP-IBM Brahmagupta AI Prize for Early Career Scientists

ICTP and IBM announce that the inaugural winner of their joint ICTP-IBM Brahmagupta Artificial Intelligence Prize for Early Career Scientists is Professor Simon Olsson of Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.

The citation reads, “for his pioneering work on the use of Artificial Intelligence methods in molecular simulations, overcoming long-standing computational problems in statistical mechanics, with translational impact on drug discovery and vaccine design.”

Olsson will receive the prize on 10 July at a ceremony starting at 10:30 at ICTP that will be livestreamed.

“Olsson’s work is particularly remarkable in that he obtained very important results both on fundamental aspects of molecular simulations using generative AI methods, and on their applications to pharmacology, for the design of new drugs and vaccines”, said Marc Mézard, a professor at Bocconi University, who chaired the selection panel, adding, “The committee has been impressed by the very high level of the young researchers who were presented to this new prize.” Other members were Professors Anima Anandkumar of Caltech, Eiman Kanjo of Nottingham Trent University, Patrick McSharry of Carnegie Mellon University, and Andrea Montanari of Stanford University.

“We are proud to recognize Professor Olsson’s innovative contributions to the field of AI for science with the first presentation of the ICTP-IBM Brahmagupta Artificial Intelligence Prize,” said Alessandro Curioni, IBM Fellow, Vice President of IBM Europe and Africa and Director of the IBM Research Lab in Zurich, Switzerland. “His work exemplifies the transformative power of AI in advancing scientific discovery. At IBM, we are committed to supporting open innovation and empowering the next generation of researchers to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges through emerging technologies.”

Simon Olsson is an associate professor in data science and AI at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. He holds a PhD in bioinformatics from the University of Copenhagen. After postdoctoral research at Freie Universität Berlin, ETH Zürich, and Università della Svizzera italiana, he joined Chalmers as an assistant professor in 2020. He was promoted to associate professor and awarded the title of Docent in Computer Science in 2024. Olsson's research focuses on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for molecular and natural sciences. Olsson is a member of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligence Systems (ELLIS) Society and a Fellow of the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous systems and Software Program (WASP).

This is the first time that the newly established ICTP-IBM Brahmagupta AI Prize is awarded. The prize was established by ICTP and IBM in 2024 to recognize outstanding young researchers working on AI for Science/Science for AI. It is supported by IBM and intends to promote research focusing on approaches to AI and science that can benefit the society at large. The award honours Indian mathematician and astronomer Brahmagupta, known for his important contributions to mathematics. In particular, he was the first to consider zero as a number and for introducing negative numbers.

The prize ceremony will take place at ICTP on Thursday 10 July 2025, as part of the "Advanced School on Foundation Models for Scientific Discovery," an eight-day advanced training activity promoted jointly by ICTP and IBM, and of the Workshop "Youth in High-Dimensions: Recent Progress in Machine Learning, High-Dimensional Statistics and Inference".

The school and the ICTP-IBM Brahmagupta Prize for AI are organised and supported by a five-year partnership between ICTP and IBM, and they contribute to the efforts of the AI Alliance, a global initiative launched by IBM and Meta aiming to accelerate responsible open innovation in AI while ensuring safety, security, and trust. ICTP is a founding member of that initiative. In the afternoon, the prize ceremony will be followed by the “AI Alliance Meetup”, an event gathering researchers in Artificial Intelligence and AI enthusiasts to explore the transformative role of AI in science and in society. The event is the first Meetup of the AI Alliance organised in Italy. It is supported by the AI Alliance and organised jointly by ICTP and the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA).

These events are also part of ICTP’s newly-launched initiative ICOMP – International Consortium for Scientific Computing, which aims to equalise access to knowledge and resources in scientific computing, including Artificial Intelligence.