ICTP celebrates the 2025 Dirac Medallists

ICTP will honour the four scientists who received its prestigious 2025 Dirac Medal at a ceremony at ICTP. The awardees are: Gary Gibbons of Cambridge University, UK, Gary Horowitz of the University of California Santa Barbara, USA, Roy Kerr of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and Robert Wald of the University of Chicago, USA.

The event will take place in the Budinich Lecture Hall, ICTP Leonardo Building, on Wednesday 25 March at 14:00 hrs CEST.

Work of the Medallists has widened our understanding of gravity, significantly shaping the study of general relativity across many generations. Their work collectively has laid the conceptual and technical foundations of our understanding of gravity, at both the classical and quantum levels.

Horowitz and Wald will take part in the event in person and deliver lectures about the contributions that earned them the prize. Horowitz’s talk will focus on the gravitational aspects of  string theory, while Wald will discuss the relation between black holes and thermodynamics. Gibbons and Kerr will join online, and Kerr will give a brief description of the construction of the Kerr Metric.

In the year of Abdus Salam’s centennial, ICTP also celebrates the 40th edition of the Dirac Medal, one of the most prestigious prizes in the field of theoretical physics.  It can be considered as a barometer for future success: eight medallists have proceeded to win Physics Nobel Prizes. The Dirac Medal was first awarded in 1985 to Yakov Zeldovich and Edward Witten. Witten, who went on to receive the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award for mathematicians, is today a global authority for all theoretical physicists and mathematicians working on string theory. He will honour the four medallists by delivering a keynote speech at the ceremony.

The ceremony will take place during the Spring School on Superstring Theory and Related Topics, an event organised annually by ICTP to provide a pedagogical introduction to these subjects through lectures by some of the world's top string and quantum field theorists.  It will be livestreamed at: www.ictp.it/livestream