ICTP's Salam Distinguished Lecture Series is an annual presentation of talks by renowned, active scientists. The aim is to showcase important research developments as well as provide a visionary forward view. The lecture series is supported by the Kuwait Programme at ICTP.

Past Salam Distinguished Lectures:
 

2026: Peter Zoller and Ignacio Cirac: From Quantum Information to Transformative Technologies -- A Journey of Remarkable Discoveries

• Lecture 1: Peter Zoller
• Lecture 2: Peter Zoller
• Lecture 3: Ignacio Cirac
• Lecture 4: Ignacio Cirac

2025: Aleksandra Walczak

• Lecture 1: How personalised is your immune repertoire?
• Lecture 2: Viral—immune co-evolution
• Lecture 3: Optimal immune systems

2024: Stéphane Mallat

• Lecture 1: Energy estimation and data generation by inverse renormalisation group 
• Lecture 2: Log-Sobolev stability, wavelets and interaction energies across scales 
• Lecture 3: Multiscale neural network models for generation by score diffusion

2023: Sandu Popescu

• Lecture 1: The Smallest Possible Thermal Machines and the Foundations of Thermodynamics
• Lecture 2: Quantum Non-locality and Beyond
• Lecture 3: Multiple-time States and the Flow of Time in Quantum Mechanics

2022: Alessandra Buonanno

• Lecture 1: What Gravitational Waves tell us About the Universe
• Lecture 2: The Making of High-Precision Gravitational Waves
• Lecture 3: Gravitational Waves as Probes of Gravity

2021: David Spergel

• Lecture 1: Our Simple Strange Universe
• Lecture 2: What the Universe's Baby Picture Reveals About Fundamental Physics
• Lecture 3: Determining the Universe's Initial Conditions

2020: Marc Mézard

• Lecture 1: Artificial Intelligence: success, limits, myths, & threats
• Lecture 2: The Spin Glass Cornucopia
• Lecture 3: Statistical Physics of Inference and Machine Learning

2019: Juan Maldacena

• Lecture 1: Quantum mechanics and the geometry of spacetime
• Lecture 2: Toy models for black holes
• Lecture 3: Toy models for black holes (part two)

 2018: Alan Guth

• Lecture 1: Inflationary Cosmology: Is Our Universe Part of a Multiverse?
• Lecture 2: Eternal Inflation and its Implications
• Lecture 3: Infinite Phase Space and the Two-Headed Arrow of Time

2017: Sir Michael Berry

• Lecture 1: Superoscillations: Unexpected fine detail and extreme values in mathematics and quantum and wave physics
• Lecture 2: Superoscillations: Unexpected fine detail and extreme values in mathematics and quantum and wave physics
• Lecture 3: Superoscillations: Unexpected fine detail and extreme values in mathematics and quantum and wave physics

2016: Sir Brian Hoskins

• Lecture 1
• Lecture 2
• Lecture 3

2015: Don Zagier

• Lecture 1
• Lecture 2
• Lecture 3
• Lecture 4
• Lecture 5

2014: Subir Sachdev

• Lecture 1
• Lecture 2
• Lecture 3
• Lecture 4

2013: William Bialek

• Lecture 1
• Lecture 2
• Lecture 3
• Lecture 4
• Lecture 5

2012: Nima Arkani-Hamed

• Lecture 1
• Lecture 2
• Lecture 3
• Lecture 4