Federico Battiston was awarded the 2025 Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics by the German Physical Society, recognizing his pioneering contributions to higher-order network science - a field that has recently enabled new insights into both human society and non-human primate culture.
The award follows the publication of a major international study co-authored by Battiston in the journal Science, which provides the strongest evidence to date that chimpanzees develop culture cumulatively, modifying and building upon previous behaviors across generations. The research sheds new light on the evolutionary roots of human cultural complexity, revealing how population connectivity and social learning may have shaped chimpanzee tool use over thousands of years.
The annual prize, which includes a €7,500 award sponsored by Capital Fund Management, honors a single researcher under the age of 40 for outstanding original contributions using physical methods to better understand socio-economic problems.