Medals and Awards

The Antonio Ambrosetti medal is awarded in memory of Antonio Ambrosetti, who was one of the first three Professors at SISSA since the foundation of the School in 1980, then appointed Professor at Scuola Normale Superiore in the years 1986-1998,  and subsequently again Professor at SISSA since 1998 to 2012. The Medal is awarded by SISSA, with the support of Scuola Normale Superiore, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Unione Matematica Italiana (UMI). Antonio Ambrosetti made several groundbreaking contributions to mathematical analysis, ranging from critical point theory, variational and topological methods, bifurcation theory, with applications in Hamiltonian systems and geometry. He is one of the founders with Giovanni Prodi of the Italian school of nonlinear analysis, with far-reaching influences in various areas of Mathematics. Simple and powerful geometric ideas standing at the basis of his approach allowed remarkable, and sometimes unexpected developments with numerous applications in differential equations. The medal recognizes exceptionally promising young researchers who have already made outstanding contributions to the fields of nonlinear analysis.

The Ambrosetti medal is awarded every two years starting from 2021. Nominations must be sent to ambrosetti_medal@sissa.it

The information on the procedure, deadlines and other regulations are attached below.

The medal has been awarded the 21 November 2025 during the conference "New frontiers in nonlinear analysis and differential equations “ to

• Yu Deng (University of Chicago),  for innovative contributions to the theory of nonlinear evolution equations and the understanding of the relations among Newtonian models of particle interactions, kinetic equations and the macroscopic description of fluid dynamics, as proposed by the long-standing open Hilbert's sixth problem. He has been able to combine strong analytical methods and ideas from other fields, such as probability theory, to obtain remarkable progress;
• Riccardo Montalto (University of Milano) for numerous and significant contributions to KAM theory for water wave and other model fluid equations, including those of Navier-Stokes and Euler, in both 2 and 3 dimensions, and including fluids behaving quasi-periodically in space. These novel results are based on pseudo-differential calculus and Nash-Moser type bifurcation theorems, and have had a profound impact on the field;
• Hong Wang (New York University and IHES) for her outstanding and pioneering contributions to harmonic analysis and related fields. Her innovative methods, including the introduction of new structural insights into wave packet analysis, have led to landmark results that illuminate central problems in analysis and its connections with number theory and geometric measure theory. Her recent work on sticky Kakeya sets has opened new directions with profound implications.

• Javier Gomez-Serrano (Brown University), for fundamental contributions to long standing and important problems in fluid dynamics;
• Alessandro Carlotto (University of Trento), for groundbreaking contributions to several different areas of geometric analysis, such as geometric relativity, minimal surface theory, and the study of manifolds with positive scalar curvature.
  
  Press Release

• Fabio Pusateri (University of Toronto), for his contributions to the field of non linear partial differential equations;
• Po-Lam Yung (Australian National University), for his work on the Sobolev spaces.

Press release

The Boris Dubrovin medal, in memory of Boris Anatolievich Dubrovin, Professor at SISSA from 1993 to 2019, is awarded by SISSA, with the support of the Moscow Mathematical Society, the “Gruppo Nazionale per la Fisica Matematica” (GNFM) and the “Gruppo Nazionale per le Strutture Algebriche, Geometriche e le loro Applicazioni” (GNSAGA), which are part of the Istituto Nazionale di Alta Matematica (INDAM). Boris Dubrovin made several groundbreaking contributions to mathematical physics, with far-reaching influences in various areas of mathematics,  see e.g. the obituary. Possibly one of his best-known inventions is the definition of Frobenius manifolds (which we ought now to refer to as "Dubrovin-Frobenius manifolds"). Their formalization built a surprising bridge between mathematical physics and differential, algebraic and symplectic geometry. The medal recognizes exceptionally promising young researchers who have already made outstanding contributions to the fields of mathematical physics and geometry. The Dubrovin medal will be awarded every two years starting from 2020.

Nominations must be sent to the address dubrovin_medal@sissa.it. 

The regulation and procedures for the Dubrovin Medal are attached below.

Winners of the 2026 edition

• Yang Li (University of Cambridge), for his impressive and creative contributions to the theory of Calabi-Yau manifolds, in particular for constructing the first example of a new complete Calabi-Yau metric on C3
  with maximal volume growth,  and for proving a weak version of the Strominger-Yau-Zaslow conjecture in many cases.
• Elba Garcia-Failde (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu, Sorbonne Université), in recognition of her contributions to topological recursion, integrable hierarchies, and enumerative geometry. In particular, she has proven Norbury’s conjecture—the negative spin analogue of Witten’s conjecture—and established W-constraints for negative r-spin intersection numbers, while uncovering new tautological relations. Her work also includes solving an open problem in free probability and in the combinatorics of maps through a universal duality, as well as advancing the quantisation of spectral curves via topological recursion.

_{Selection Committee:}

_{Prof. Jinho Baik (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), Prof.ssa Anna Fino (Università di Torino), Prof.ssa Tamara Grava (SISSA), Prof. Carlangelo Liverani (Università di Roma Tor Vergata & University of Maryland), Prof. Alexander Veselov (Loughborough University).}

The sponsors of the 2026 Dubrovin medal are the Letters in Mathematical Physics and SISSA Medialab.            

• Soheyla Feyzbakhsh for her impressive results in algebraic geometry, with relevant implications for mathematical physics, in particular string theory. In addition to completing and generalizing Mukai's program on K3 surfaces, she has introduced innovative methods in enumerative geometry, using stability conditions on derived categories, leading to spectacular results for Calabi-Yau 3-folds. In particular, Feyzbakhsh's work establishes that Donaldson- Thomas (DT) theory in any rank is governed by rank one theory, and thus Gromov- Witten (GW) invariants. Moreover, she shows that DT and GW invariants are determined by rank zero DT invariants. The medal also acknowledges the far- reaching impact that these results are going to have on both enumerative algebraic geometry and mathematical physics.
• Pierrick Bousseau for the originality, complexity, and relevance of his remarkable contributions in enumerative algebraic geometry and mirror symmetry, and their profound implications for mathematical physics. These include connections between refined tropical curve counts and higher genus log Gromov-Witten counts of toric surfaces; a proof of the Takahashi conjecture via a new sheaf/curve correspondence; substantial contributions to holomorphic Floer theory and its relation to Donaldson-Thomas theory; the extension of the log-local principle in Gromov-Witten theory to all genera and to Looijenga pairs; and a remarkable advance in the solution of the Gromov-Witten theory of smooth complete intersections.

_{Selection Committee}

_{Prof. Victor Buchstaber (Moscow State University and Moscow Mathematical Society), Prof. Stavros Garoufalidis (International center for Mathematics, Southern University of Science and Technology), Prof. Davide Guzzetti (SISSA), Prof. Vieri Mastropietro (GNFM and University of Milano), Prof. Youjin Zhang (Tsinghua University).}

• Amol Aggarwal, for his impressive contribution in integrable probability, random matrix theory and moduli spaces. In particular he has established the local Gibbs measure and the fluctuation around the limit shape in a class of random Lozenge tiling models. By mastery subtle asymptotic combinatorial analysis, he has obtained large genus asymptotics for Siegel-Veech constants, for intersection numbers and for volumes of strata of Abelian and quadratic differentials;
• Pavlo Gavrylenko, for his work connecting isomonodromic τ-functions of Painleve equations to conformal blocks of Virasoro algebra/Nekrasov partition functions and for generalizing these results to higher rank systems, to systems on the torus and to q-difference Painleve’ equations;
• Georg Oberdieck, for his extraordinarily masterful and creative cycle of papers on the enumerative geometry of Hilbert schemes in K3 surfaces, and related manifolds, culminating in his paper on holomorphic anomaly equations for the Hilbert scheme of points of a K3 surface.

_{Selection Committee
Prof. Mauro Carfora (GNFM and Universita’ di Pavia), Prof. Tamara Grava (SISSA), Prof. Igor Krichever (Columbia University), Prof. Marco Manetti (GNSAGA and Universita’ di Roma I), Prof. Pierre Van Moerbeke (Université catholique de Louvain).}

• Gaetan Borot from the  Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, Bonn, is awarded the Dubrovin medal in recognition of his numerous and wide-ranging contributions to the theory of topological recursion leading to the proof of the Bouchard-Marino conjecture and to several applications to geometry and mathematical physics in the area of integrable systems.
• Alexandr Buryak from the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, is awarded the Dubrovin medal in recognition of his results in the proof of the polynomiality of the Dubrovin–Zhang hierarchy in relation with the double ramification hierarchy, in the analysis of the double-ramification cycles and his contributions to the theory of moduli spaces of open Riemann surfaces.

_{Selection Committee
Prof. Dario Bambusi (GNFM), Prof. Marco Bertola (SISSA), Prof. Marta Mazzocco (University of Birmingham), Prof. Simon Salamon (GNSAGA and King's College of London), Prof. Victor Vassiliev (Moscow Mathematical Society).}