Congratulations to ISSNAF Young Investigator 2025 Awardees!

On November 6th, ISSNAF hosted its Annual Event at the Embassy of Italy in Washington, D.C., with the honor of welcoming H.E. Ambassador Peronaci and representatives from key Italian institutions. The event celebrated the finalists of the five 2025 Young Investigator Awards and announced the recipients of these prestigious honors.

ISSNAF extends its heartfelt congratulations to all the 2025 Young Investigator Award winners for their outstanding achievements!

Embassy of Italy Award

Dr. Marco Colangelo, Assistant Professor, Northeastern University

"High-performance superconducting detectors for quantum information science applications."

Prof. Colangelo has been selected for his remarkable contributions to the field of quantum technologies, addressing the important challenge of realizing reliable and efficient detection of single photons for building scalable quantum information processing architectures.

INFN Bruno Touschek Award  Prof. Antonella Palmese, Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University

"Gravitational waves as a new cosmological probe."

Prof. Palmese is awardees for her pioneering the integration of galaxy surveys and gravitational wave astronomy, and for playing a leadership role in developing a new cosmological analysis technique with the aim of constraining the Hubble constant using the dark sirens method.

Mario Gerla Award Prof. Antonio Loquercio, Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania

"Re-thinking the Role of Perception for Decision Making."

Dr. Antonio Loquercio's research enhances the performance of complex robotic systems by focusing on the pivotal role of perception in building effective world models for decision-making. He has demonstrated that even simple perceptual models can enable agile drone

flight, and explored how robots can use their own sensor data to refine their world models.

Paola Campese Award  Dr. Maria Caterina Rotiroti, Research Fellow, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

"Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy for hematological malignancies."

Dr. Rotiroti is awarded the 2025 YI Paola Campese award for her leading role in engineering a novel membrane-tethered version of the adapter molecule SLP-76 (MT-SLP-76), which lowers the activation threshold of CAR T cells. This groundbreaking work, recently accepted for publication in Nature Cancer with Dr. Rotiroti as first author and licensed by a biotechnology company, paves the way for next-generation clinical trials addressing one of the major challenges in cellular therapy — the low or absent expression of target antigens in hematological malignancies. Dr. Rotiroti’s commitment and academic excellence are reflected in competitive grants from ASTCT, AACR, and the American Italian Foundation for Cancer, as well as five first-author publications in top-tier journals.

RnB4Culture Award

Dr. Sara Galli, International Visiting Lecturer, Dickinson College

"Inclusive Language and Educational Change in Italian Courses."

Dr. Galli is awarded with the 2025 YI RnB4Culture Award for her research aiming to create an educational platform for teaching the Italian language to North American students, taking into account all the needs arising from the social implications of contemporary language use, including considerations related to gender and other aspects.