It was her sister who called her “Science”, long before official recognition certified her talent. Emma Prévot, 25 years old, was the overall winner of the 2025 “Super Nova 111 List”, the award that crowns the best Italian talent under 25 among the most promising young people in the country. A journey that starts from Crema, in the province of Cremona, and arrives at the most advanced research centers in the world, passing through London, Cambridge and Oxford.
Italian mother, French father, Emma attended the scientific high school of applied sciences in Crema. She becomes passionate about mathematics thanks to a teacher who encourages her to compete in the Cesenatico Olympics. Meanwhile he falls in love with modern physics, between quantum and astrophysics, fueled by readings such as The devil’s physics by James Al-Khalili e The order of time by Carlo Rovelli, which, he claims, he has read ten times. He would like to spend his fourth year abroad, but the school advises against it because he might not get the best in his final exams. The parents agree. She will finish high school in Italy, then they will support her to study abroad. In the autumn of the fifth year of high school she began to look at foreign universities: Oxford and Cambridge were now past the deadline to apply, but she was admitted to both Manchester andUniversity College London. He chooses London and physics.
“I lived in a tiny room, but the world that opened up to me was immense,” he says in an interview. She specializes in medical physics, fascinated by the human body as a physical system: the brain as a circuit, the blood as a fluid. At UCL she immediately stood out: best student on the course for two consecutive years, best student in the entire engineering faculty in her second year. “I’m not a nerd, but there’s one thing I can’t stand: wasting time.”
After a three-year thesis on artificial intelligence, Emma decides to build a solid foundation in machine learning with a master’s degree at Cambridge. Today he is at Oxford, where he is doing a PhD in statistics and developing AI models applied to medicine, with particular attention to neurodegenerative diseases. A choice that has its roots in a personal question that has never been resolved: why did the grandfather, who survived two tumors, lose himself and die of Alzheimer’s? Already in 2024 he received the Giovane Italia 2024 award promoted by the Cnr at the Quirinale to enhance talents under 35 in any field. And after the Super Nova 111 List 2025 he started traveling all over the world again on the occasion of top-level scientific conferences such as the BayesComp in Singapore where he presented a causal machine learning algorithm capable of estimating the effect of a medical treatment over time, building a reduced version of a “digital twin” of the patient; at the OHBM in Brisbane he presented a work on neuroimaging, dedicated to the harmonization of brain images even in the absence of the technical data of the scanners.
According to her, family support and determination are the basis of these extraordinary results: «I owe everything to the education I received in my family, who always recognized my commitment when I did something beautiful. My parents have always encouraged me, they always told me ‘yes go’, ‘yes do’, ‘yes well done we recognize your potential”, invest in yourself, put 100% and we will invest in you. And then it takes a lot of courage and determination, it takes a lot of work and a certain amount of self-confidence because for every offer received, for every yes received there are really a lot of no’s and a lot of rejection behind it”.
We will definitely continue to hear about Emma Prévot.
