International award to Cuban scientist to be announced today

HAVANA, Cuba, Dec 13 (ACN) The awarding of the 2023 Spirit of Salam Award to Cuban Academician of Merit Hugo Pérez Rojas will be announced today in Trieste, Italy, by the International Center for Theoretical Physics, sponsored by UNESCO, IAEA, and the Italian government.

Perez Rojas, holder of a PhD in Physico-Mathematical Sciences, told ACN about the Center’s decision to recognize him with the award named after the famous scientist Mohammad Abdus Salam (1926-1996), a theoretical physicist of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

“Pérez Rojas, a scientist who has dedicated his whole life to theoretical physics, fully deserves this incentive, and it’s also an honor for our institution,” said Dr. Lilliam Álvarez Díaz, secretary of the Cuban Academy of Sciences.

The awardee is a senior researcher with the Institute of Cybernetics, Mathematics and Physics (ICIMAF), and founder of its Department of Theoretical Physics. He has championed Exact Sciences in Cuba and other Third World countries and taught Classical Mechanics, Electrodynamics, Quantum Mechanics, and Statistical Physics and was Principal of the School of Physics and Head of the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Institute of Fundamental Technical Research of the Cuban Academy of Sciences.

In 1962, he had the honor of giving a course on Mathematics to Commander Ernesto Guevara and, in 1995, was the first professor to become member of the World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), founded in Trieste, Italy, in 1983.

Mohammad Abdus Salam, a Pakistani theoretical physicist, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 for his work on the electroweak model, a mathematical and conceptual synthesis of electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force.