The Iside Lavezzari Award 2025 goes to Gea Cereghetti

Gea Cereghetti, researcher from Ticino, has been awarded the Premio Massimo della Fondazione Iside Lavezzari 2025 (Grand Prize of the Iside Lavezzari Foundation 2025) for her contributions to research on neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. The award ceremony took place on 18 January 2026 at Cinema Teatro in Chiasso.

Beginning in June 2026, Gea Cereghetti will join the researchers at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) in Bellinzona as the laboratory director. She will bring her own research group and begin a new phase of her scientific endeavours in Ticino.

The award honours an international scientific career dedicated to studying the biological mechanisms behind neurodegenerative diseases, which are becoming increasingly important for health and social issues. In interviews related to the award, the researcher highlighted how significant progress has been made in recent years in understanding the molecular processes that contribute to the development of these diseases. In particular, the scientific perspective on the protein aggregates that form in the brain has changed: their presence is often the result of advanced stages of the disease, when the possibilities for intervention are limited. For this reason, a growing part of research today focuses on early diagnosis, aiming to identify the disease before the onset of symptoms and irreversible neurological damage.

The full interviews are available at tio.ch and on the RSI – SEIDISERA portal.