2025 ICO/ICTP Award Winners Announced

ICTP and the International Commission for Optics (ICO) have announced the winners of their 2025 ICO-ICTP Gallieno Denardo Award. This year's awardees hail from Egypt and Argentina.
 
Omnia Hamdy Abdelrahman Nematallah, from the National Institute of Laser Enhanced Sciences at Cairo University, has been awarded the 2025 ICO-ICTP award “for her groundbreaking work in biophotonics and the development of innovative optical technologies for biomedical applications having important implications for public health, and for her strong mentorship of young scientists, encouraging interdisciplinary approaches that strengthen the field, especially across developing regions".
 
Gustavo Grinblat, from the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences, University of Buenos Aires, and the Argentine Research Council - CONICET, receives the award “for his important contributions to nonlinear and ultrafast optics in dielectric nano-resonators with potential applications in telecommunication and information processing, his active leadership within the Argentine optics and physics communities, and outreach activities aimed at high school students”.
 
Both will be recognized for their work in an awards ceremony taking place on Tuesday 4 March 2025 at 15:00 in ICTP's Kastler Lecture Hall; the event will be livestreamed on ICTP's YouTube channel. 
 
The ICO/ICTP Gallieno Denardo Award honors young researchers in optics and photonics. The award is given during the annual ICTP Winter College on Optics, which is focusing this year on theoretical and applied aspects of metamaterials and metasurfaces. Award recipients are invited and supported to attend the college, given a monetary award, and invited to deliver the ICO-ICTP Gallieno Denardo Prize Lecture on their research to a large number of their colleagues from all over the world.
 
The International Commission for Optics (ICO) and ICTP established their joint award in 2000. In September 2007, the ICTP and ICO agreed to dedicate the Award to the memory and legacy of the late Gallieno Denardo, who greatly contributed to the development of optics research within ICTP and in developing countries. The prize has recognized many researchers under 40 from developing countries doing distinguished and important work in optics and photonics. For the full list of past winners, visit the prize website.