Villa is an Associate Professor at the Department of Radiology and Oncology of the Faculdade de Medicina of the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) and Head of the Innovation in Cancer Research of the Center for Translational Research in Oncology of the Instituto do Câncer do Estado de São Paulo (ICESP), São Paulo, Brazil. She graduated in Biological Sciences, USP and has a PhD in Sciences from the Institute of Chemistry of USP (1978). She was a researcher at the São Paulo branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research from 1983 to 2011, and was its director from 2006 to 2010. She is a full member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. In 2018 she received the Biology Prize from The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) in Trieste, Italy. Her research involves studies about human papillomavirus (HPV), cervical cancer, anogenital cancer, head and neck cancer, HPV infections in women and men, prophylactic HPV vaccines. As of end-2019, she had published 334 scientific articles (h-index: WOS 60). She made more than 500 presentations as invited speaker in meetings throughout the world. She has mentored 13 MSc, 20 PhD students and 8 Pos-Doctoral fellows.

Salam, a pioneering Pakistani theoretical physicist, earned his PhD in Cambridge, UK. He made significant contributions to the field of particle physics and his groundbreaking work in electroweak unification theory earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979, shared with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg. He played a crucial role in developing Pakistan’s scientific infrastructure, including founding the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO) and the Theoretical Physics Group. In 1964, he established the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, to support scientists from developing countries, and served as its director until 1993. In 1983, Salam also founded TWAS—the Third World Academy of Sciences, as it was originally known—and was a leading figure in the creation of a number of international centres dedicated to the advancement of science and technology. He was a Fellow of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences and also a member of many other prestigious academies and societies in the world, among which the Royal Society (UK), the USSR Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences (USA), and the Accademia dei Lincei (Italy).