Rajesh Gopakumar, Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad, India, has been awarded the 2006 ICTP Prize. Gopakumar is a highly accomplished string theorist whose important contributions to the field include papers on large N gauge theories, solitons in noncommutative field theories and topological string theory. His work on the latter topic, conducted with Cumrun Vafa, inspired the theory of Gopakumar-Vafa invariants in mathematics. More recently, he has pioneered a programme to understand the free field theory limit of the correspondence between quantum field theories and gravitational systems in one higher dimension. The 2006 ICTP Prize is being given in honour of Gian-Carlo Wick (1909-1992), a student of Enrico Fermi, who is well-known among theoretical physicists for “Wick’s theorem” and “Wick rotation". Wick visited ICTP in 1973 to participate the Topical Meeting on Weak Interactions. The official awards ceremony will be held at a later date.