Roberto Battiston, former president of the Italian Space Agency and professor of experimental physics at the University of Trento, was awarded the 2019 International Science and Technology Cooperation Award. 
The prestigious honour was established by the People's Republic of China in 1994, and it is conferred on foreign individuals or organizations that have made important contributions to China’s science and technology development.
Battiston received the prize during a ceremony that took place in the People’s Hall in Beijing also attended by the new Italian ambassador to China, Luca Ferrari, in the presence of president Xi Jinping, premier Li Keqiang and vice premier Liu He.
The International Science and Technology Cooperation Award is the most important honour that is awarded by the Chinese government to foreign scientists: in the past, it was conferred to other Italian scholars, including Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia, geophysicist Fabio Rocca and chemist Umberto Colombo.
Roberto Battiston
Roberto Battiston led the Italian Space Agency (ASI) from 2014 to 2018, giving new life to Italian space activities at national and international level, and chaired the National Scientific Committee of INFN on astroparticle physics; from 2009 to 2014 he worked intensively on space research, coordinating with physics Nobel prize laureate Samuel C. C. Ting the creation of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, an experiment of the International space station on antimatter, and was responsible for Italian-Chinese collaboration on the Chinese satellite CSES through the Limadou experiment (Matteo Ricci), whose purpose was to search for new techniques for seismic monitoring from space.