Salam Distinguished Lectures Series

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