Maurizio Landrini died in a motorcycle accident on 26 June 2003, aged just 40 years. He was Italy's foremost ship hydrodynamicist at that time and nominated Weinblum lecturer for 2003/2004, the first Italian and the youngest scientist ever to receive this prestigious award as most notable ship hydrodynamicist.

Maurizio Landrini studied mechanical engineering at the university La Sapienza in Rome where he received in 1994 his doctoral degree for a thesis on non-linear wave-propagation phenomena. He then became a permanent researcher at INSEAN, the Italian ship model basin. His talent and hard work resulted in a rapidly gaining international reputation. The rise of INSEAN from relative obscurity to what has been widely considered as the world's leading research group in marine CFD was to a considerable part due to Landrini's performance.

His achievements were reflected in promotions to head of the seakeeping and maneuvering group in 1997 and director of the towing tank facilities in 2002. In 1996, Landrini was a visiting researcher at the University of California Santa Barbara, working with Marshall Tulin, and 1997 at the Norwegian Technical University in Trondheim, working with Odd Faltinsen. He kept close ties with both places, teaching at USCB and sending PhD students to both places. He supervised numerous master theses and several PhD theses, mostly at La Sapienza University in Rome, but also in international cooperation with several universities.

His work resulted in a constant stream of high-level publications, mostly on numerical simulations of unsteady ship flows. Landrini was an expert both in inviscid and viscid methods as well as experimental techniques. This rather unique width of expertise allowed him to discuss advantages and shortcoming of different approaches without bias. He never had to resort to aggressiveness, neither in asking questions, nor in answering them.

Maurizio Landrini enjoyed his work and cared deeply for the researchers in his group, which he considered as ‘his children'. He encouraged and enabled ‘his children' to present their work and form scientific and personal networks early in their career and supported the NuTTS series of workshop actively, hosting the 2nd symposium. The award serves to keep his spirit alive, encouraging young talented researchers to pursue a career in numerical ship hydrodynamics in a cooperative and international style.