USI Alumni Award

The USI Alumni Award 2026 has been awarded to:

Fabio Bossi
USI Degree: PhD in Economics, 2006
Delegate for Southern Switzerland at the Swiss National Bank

This award recognises an academic and professional career of great merit, which has seen Fabio Bossi hold a prominent position in an institution central to our country. His work combines expertise, rigour, and a deep sense of institutional duty, with a tangible impact on the region.

His profile clearly demonstrates how the education received at USI can translate into a meaningful contribution to economic and social development, and how economic research can be directly applied to public policy.

Taken from the laudatio, USI, April 25, 2026. The full laudatio is available here.

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The USI Alumni Award 2025 has been awarded to:

Giacomo Brenna
USI Degree in Architecture, 2003
Founder and architect of the Lopes Brenna studio

In 2011, together with Cristiana Lopes, he founded the Lopes Brenna studio, initially based in Como, Italy, and later in Chiasso, Switzerland. The studio has exhibited its work in Como, Venice, Trapani, Bari, Rome, Munich, and Nice, and has been featured in various international magazines.
In 2017 and 2019, the studio was awarded the "Leonardo" prize at the Architecture Biennale in Minsk, Belarus. In 2016, it was selected to participate in the exhibition “Stanze. Altre filosofie dell’abitare” at the XXI Triennale di Milano.
In 2016 and 2023, the studio received the Maestri Comacini award, and in 2022, it was nominated for the Swiss Architectural Award. Alongside their design work, Giacomo Brenna and Cristiana Lopes have been guest lecturers at the USI Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, the Politecnico di Milano, and the University of Genoa.

The USI Alumni Award 2024 has been awarded to:

Shane Legg
USI Degree: PhD in Informatics USI, 2008
Co-founder of Google DeepMind

Shane Legg, originally from New Zealand, is a leading figure in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). He is best known for his work on artificial general intelligence (AGI) and for co-founding DeepMind Technologies, later acquired by Google. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Waikato in 1996 and earned his MSc with a thesis on Solomonoff Induction at the University of Auckland in the same year. Legg, together with Ben Goertzel, played a significant role in promoting the term “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) in the early 2000s. This term has been instrumental in shifting the focus of AI research towards creating systems that can perform any cognitive task that a human can perform. He expressed concerns about the existential risks posed by AI and signed a statement on the risk of AI's extinction in 2023. Before completing his PhD at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA) at Università della Svizzera italiana, where he worked on theoretical models of super-intelligent machines with Marcus Hutter, Legg held various positions in software development and worked on big data projects. His doctoral thesis, "Machine Super Intelligence", laid the foundation for his later work. After his PhD, he completed a post-doc in finance and then continued his research at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London.

In 2010, he co-founded DeepMind Technologies with Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman. The startup quickly became a leading AI research lab, focusing on learning and neural networks, before being acquired by Google in 2014.

Dr. Legg is one of the world's 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence.

Listen to the interview

Guidelines USI Alumni Award 2026