Lagrange Prize

Since 2008, every Autumn has been marked by the celebration of the Lagrange-Fondazione CRT Award, promoted by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Torino and coordinated with the scientific advice of Fondazione ISI.
This prize is normally awarded to scientists of international repute who have distinguished themselves for their innovative, world-leading contribution to complexity and data science.

2020, now coming to an end, has been painfully marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has wounded and indelibly scarred our communities, affecting our loved ones as well as our activities. We felt that this year, due to objective and (above all) ethical reasons, it would not be appropriate to select one winner of the Award.
Indeed, an individual prize seemed out of step with the sustained, collective effort of the international scientific community to better understand the pandemic, the virus that causes it, and to face to biggest social, economic, and public health challenge of a generation.

We thus decided to award our special grant to all ISI scientists who are contributing or have contributed with their research to this hard fight - one that we hope will soon be won.

David Gruber
David Gruber is Presidential Professor of Biology and Environmental Science at Baruch College, City University of New York and serves on the faculty of the Ph.D. Program in Biology at the CUNY Graduate Center and the CUNY Macaulay Honors College. He is also an Explorer for National Geographic, a Research Associate in Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History and an Adjunct Faculty member at the John B. Pierce Laboratory of the Yale School of Medicine. His interdisciplinary research pertains to marine biology, genomics/transcriptomics of uncharacterized marine organism, deep-sea ecology, soft robotics, photosynthesis, biofluorescence, bioluminescence and applying advanced machine learning techniques to better understand whale bioacoustics.

Iain Couzin
Iain Couzin is Director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Department of Collective Behaviour, Co-Director of the DFG Excellence Cluster ‘Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour’ and Chair of Biodiversity and Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz, Germany. His work aims to reveal the fundamental principles that underlie evolved collective behavior, and consequently his research includes the study of a wide range of biological systems, from insect swarms to fish schools and primate groups. He has pioneered the study of collective sensing, information processing and decision-making in animal groups.
In addition to the various awards already received, in 2018 he obtained the Clarivate Analytics (Web of Science) Global Highly Cited Researcher.

César A. Hidalgo
César A. Hidalgo leads the Collective Learning group at The MIT Media Lab and is an Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT. Hidalgo's work focuses on understanding how teams, organizations, cities, and nations learn. At the Collective Learning group, Hidalgo studies knowledge flows and also creates software tools to facilitate learning in organizations. Hidalgo's academic publications have been cited more than 12,000 times and his online systems have received more than 100 million pageviews and numerous awards. Hidalgo's latest book, Why Information Grows (Basic Books, 2015), has been translated to over ten languages. Hidalgo is also the co-author of The Atlas of Economic Complexity (MIT Press, 2014), and a co-founder of Datawheel LLC, a company that has professionalized the creation of large data visualization engines. Hidalgo lives in Somerville Massachusetts with his wife Anna and their daughter Iris.

Danielle S. Bassett
Danielle S. Bassett is Eduardo D. Glandt Faculty Fellow Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
With her group Danielle Bassett studies biological, physical, and social systems by using and developing tools from network science and complex systems theory. Their broad goal is to isolate problems at the intersection of basic science, engineering, and clinical medicine that can be tackled using systems-level approaches.
Bassett's group is currently studying dynamic changes in network architecture, the interaction between topological properties of networks and physical or other constraints, and the influence of network topology on signal propagation and system function. They use a combination of data analysis, mathematical modelling, and empirical studies to investigate these phenomena.

John Brownstein
John Brownstein, Ph.D. is Professor of Pediatrics and Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and is the Chief Innovation Officer of Boston Children’s Hospital. He also directs the Computational Epidemiology Group at the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program in Boston.
He was trained as an epidemiologist at Yale University.
Overall, his research agenda aims to have translation impact on the surveillance, control and prevention of disease.
He has been at the forefront of the development and application of digital health tools including HealthMap.org, an internet-based global infectious disease intelligence system. Dr. Brownstein has advised the World Health Organization, Institute of Medicine, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the White House on real-time public health surveillance.
He has authored over 200 peer-reviewed articles which have provided foundational learnings for the emerging field of digital epidemiology.

Jure Leskovec
Jure Leskovec is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University where is member of the InfoLab and the AI lab. His research focuses on mining and modeling large social and information networks, their evolution, and diffusion of information and influence over them.

Panos Ipeirotis
Panos Ipeirotis is Associate Professor and George A. Kellner Faculty Fellow at the Department of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences at Leonard N. Stern School of Business of New York University. His recent research interests focus on crowdsourcing and on mining user-generated content on the Internet.

Mark Newman
Mark Newman with his group conducts research on the structure and function of networks, particularly social and information networks, that are studied using a combination of empirical methods, analytics, and computer simulation.
Among other things, he has investigated scientific coauthorship networks, citation networks, email networks, friendship networks, epidemiological contact networks, and animal social networks; his group studied fundamental network properties such as degree distributions, centrality measures, assortative mixing, vertex similarity, and community structure, and made analytic or computer models of disease propagation, friendship formation, the spread of computer viruses, , the Internet, and network navigation algorithms.

Duncan J. Watts
Is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and a founding member of the MSR-NYC lab. From 2000-2007, he was a professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and then, prior to joining Microsoft, a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directed the Human Social Dynamics group. Watts describes his research as exploring the "role that network structure plays in determining or constraining system behavior, focusing on a few broad problem areas in social science such as information contagion, financial risk management, and organizational design”. More recently he has attracted attention for his modern-day replication of Stanley Milgram's small world experiment using email messages and for his studies of popularity and fads in on-line and other communities. The six degrees research is based on his 1998 paper with Steven Strogatz in which the two presented a mathematical theory of the small world phenomenon.

Riccardo Luna
Is an Italian journalist and writer, director of the online magazine “CheFuturo!” and was formerly the first director of Wired Italian edition. Since 2011 he has written about innovation on La Repubblica newspaper. He’s also columnist on Wired, Vanity Fair and Traveller. Since 2012 he is Chairman of Wikitalia, an association whose aim is to spread transparency, open data and participation in Italian politics by the use of the Internet. He is also coordinator of the Expo2015 Innovation Advisory Board and Board Member of Oxfam and Building Green Future.

Lada Adamic
Is Associate Professor at the School of information & Center for the study of Complex Systems of the University of Michigan. She studies the structure and dynamics of social and information networks, with particular enphasis on information di usion, expertise sharing and on line communities.

Xavier Gabaix
Is Associate Professor of Finance at the NYU Stern School of Business. His reasearch interests focus on asset pricing, executive pay, the causes and consequences of seemingly irrational behavior, the origin scaling laws in economics and macroeconomics.

Albert Laszlo Barabasi
He is a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University, Boston where he directs the Center for Complex Networks Research and holds appointments in the Departments of physics, Computer Science and Biology, as well as in the Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women Hospital and is a member of the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
Barabasi’s work on complex networks lead to the discovery of scale-free networks and he proposed the Barabasi-Albert model to explain their widespread emergence in natural, technological and social systems, from the cellular telephone to the WWW or online communities.

James J. Collins
Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Co-Director of the Center for BioDynamics at Boston University.
He is one of the founders of the emerging eld of synthetic biology and a pioneering researcher in systems biology, stochastic resonance, biological dynamics and neurostimulation.

Giorgio Parisi
Full professor at the University La Sapienza in Rome where currently teaches probability theory, is member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and of the National Academy of Science.
He did research in several fields of Physics and in particular in Physics of disordered systems and statistical mechanics.
He is author and co-author of a number of scientific books like La Chiave, la luce e l’ubriaco and Statistical Physics.