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The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics and Mathematics is a scientific award, funded by Sergey Brin of Google; internet entrepreneurs Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan of Facebook; entrepreneur and venture capitalist Yuri Milner; and Anne Wojcicki, one of the founders of the genetics company 23andMe. [1]
Since its establishment, the prize has been awarded to numerous scientists across the globe for their major contributions and discoveries in their respective scientific fields. Laureates receive $3 million each in prize money making it the largest awarded in the sciences. [2] From 2013 to 2024, it has been awarded to sixteen female scientists including two special and one posthumous recognitions, and three of whom were eventually awarded a Nobel Prize for their work: Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier in 2019 for Chemistry, and Katalin Karikó in 2023 for Physiology or Medicine.[ citation needed ]
Year | Field | Portrait | Citation Laureate | Nationality | Motivations | Institute |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
2013 [1] | Life Sciences | Cornelia Bargmann (born 1961) | United States | "for the genetics of neural circuits and behavior, and synaptic guidepost molecules." | Rockefeller University | |
Titia de Lange (born 1955) | Netherlands United States | "for research on telomeres, illuminating how they protect chromosome ends and their role in genome instability in cancer." | Rockefeller University | |||
Fundamental Physics (special) | Fabiola Gianotti (born 1960) | Italy | "for their leadership role in the scientific endeavour that led to the discovery of the new Higgs-like particle by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN's Large Hadron Collider." (awarded with Peter Jenni (ATLAS), Michel Della Negra, Tejinder Singh Virdee, Guido Tonelli, Joe Incandela (CMS) and Lyn Evans (LHC)) | CERN | ||
2015 [3] | Life Sciences | Jennifer Doudna (born 1964) | United States | "for harnessing an ancient mechanism of bacterial immunity into a powerful and general technology for editing genomes, with wide-ranging implications across biology and medicine." | University of California, Berkeley Howard Hughes Medical Institute | |
Emmanuelle Charpentier (born 1968) | France | Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research Umeå University | ||||
2016 [4] | Life Sciences | Helen Hobbs (born 1952) | United States | "for the discovery of human genetic variants that alter the levels and distribution of cholesterol and other lipids, inspiring new approaches to the prevention of cardiovascular and liver disease." | University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center Howard Hughes Medical Institute | |
2017 [5] | Life Sciences | Huda Zoghbi (born 1954) | Lebanon United States | "for discoveries of the genetic causes and biochemical mechanisms of spinocerebellar ataxia and Rett syndrome, findings that have provided insight into the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative and neurological diseases." | Baylor College of Medicine Texas Children's Hospital Howard Hughes Medical Institute | |
2018 [5] | Life Sciences | Joanne Chory (born 1955) | United States | "for discovering how plants optimize their growth, development, and cellular structure to transform sunlight into chemical energy." | Salk Institute for Biological Studies Howard Hughes Medical Institute | |
Fundamental Physics (special) | Jocelyn Bell Burnell (born 1943) | United Kingdom | "for fundamental contributions to the discovery of pulsars, and a lifetime of inspiring leadership in the scientific community." | University of Oxford University of Dundee | ||
2019 [5] | Life Sciences | Angelika Amon (1967–2020) | Austria United States | "for determining the consequences of aneuploidy, an abnormal chromosome number resulting from chromosome mis-segregation." | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | |
2020 [6] | Life Sciences | Virginia Man-Yee Lee (born 1945) | China United States | "for discovering TDP43 protein aggregates in frontotemporal dementia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and revealing that different forms of alpha-synuclein, in different cell types, underlie Parkinson's disease and Multiple System Atrophy." | University of Pennsylvania | |
Mathematics (posthumous) | Maryam Mirzakhani (1977–2017) | Iran United States | "for revolutionary discoveries in the dynamics and geometry of moduli spaces of Abelian differentials, including the proof of the 'magic wand theorem'." (awarded jointly with Alex Eskin) | Stanford University | ||
2021 [7] | Life Sciences | Catherine Dulac (born 1963) | France United States | "for deconstructing the complex behavior of parenting to the level of cell-types and their wiring, and demonstrating that the neural circuits governing both male and female-specific parenting behaviors are present in both sexes." | Harvard University Howard Hughes Medical Institute | |
2022 [8] | Life Sciences | Katalin Karikó (born 1955) | Hungary United States | "for engineering modified RNA technology which enabled rapid development of effective COVID-19 vaccines." (awarded jointly with Drew Weissman) | BioNTech University of Pennsylvania | |
2024 [9] | Life Sciences | Sabine Hadida (born 1966) | Spain United States | "for developing life-transforming drug combinations that repair the defective chloride channel protein in patients with cystic fibrosis." (awarded jointly with Paul Negulescu and Fredrick Van Goor) | Vertex Pharmaceuticals | |
Ellen Sidransky (born 1955) | United States | "for identifying GBA1 and LRRK2 as risk genes for Parkinson's disease, implicating autophagy and lysosomal biology as critical contributors to the pathogenesis of the disease." | National Human Genome Research Institute National Institutes of Health |
Ashoke Sen FRS is an Indian theoretical physicist and distinguished professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), Bangalore. A former distinguished professor at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad, He is also an honorary fellow in National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER) India he is also a Morningstar Visiting professor at MIT and a distinguished professor at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study. His main area of work is string theory. He was among the first recipients of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics "for opening the path to the realization that all string theories are different limits of the same underlying theory".
The MIT Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP) is the hub of theoretical nuclear physics, particle physics, and quantum information research at MIT. It is a subdivision of MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science and Department of Physics.
The Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics (SITP) is a research institute within the Physics Department at Stanford University. Led by 16 physics faculty members, the institute conducts research in high energy and condensed matter theoretical physics.
Giorgio Parisi is an Italian theoretical physicist, whose research has focused on quantum field theory, statistical mechanics and complex systems. His best known contributions are the QCD evolution equations for parton densities, obtained with Guido Altarelli, known as the Altarelli–Parisi or DGLAP equations, the exact solution of the Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model of spin glasses, the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation describing dynamic scaling of growing interfaces, and the study of whirling flocks of birds. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro Manabe for groundbreaking contributions to theory of complex systems, in particular "for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales".
David Baker is an American biochemist and computational biologist who has pioneered methods to design proteins and predict their three-dimensional structures. He is the Henrietta and Aubrey Davis Endowed Professor in Biochemistry, an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and an adjunct professor of genome sciences, bioengineering, chemical engineering, computer science, and physics at the University of Washington.
Peter van Nieuwenhuizen is a Dutch theoretical physicist. He is a distinguished Professor at Stony Brook University in the United States. Widely known for his contributions to String theory, Supersymmetry, Supergravity and Field theory.
Lyn Evans CBE FINSTP FLSW FRS, is a Welsh scientist who served as the project leader of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Based at CERN, in 2012 he became the director of the Linear Collider Collaboration, an international organisation managing development of next generation particle colliders, including the International Linear Collider and the Compact Linear Collider.
Alexei Yurievich Kitaev is a Russian–American professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology and permanent member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is best known for introducing the quantum phase estimation algorithm and the concept of the topological quantum computer while working at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is also known for introducing the complexity class QMA and showing the 2-local Hamiltonian problem is QMA-complete, the most complete result for k-local Hamiltonians. Kitaev is also known for contributions to research on a model relevant to researchers of the AdS/CFT correspondence started by Subir Sachdev and Jinwu Ye; this model is known as the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev (SYK) model.
The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics is one of the Breakthrough Prizes, awarded by the Breakthrough Prize Board. Initially named Fundamental Physics Prize, it was founded in July 2012 by Russia-born Israeli entrepreneur, venture capitalist and physicist Yuri Milner. The prize is awarded to physicists from theoretical, mathematical, or experimental physics that have made transformative contributions to fundamental physics, and specifically for recent advances.
The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences is a scientific award, funded by internet entrepreneurs Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan of Facebook; Sergey Brin of Google; entrepreneur and venture capitalist Yuri Milner; and Anne Wojcicki, one of the founders of the genetics company 23andMe.
The Breakthrough Prizes are a set of international awards bestowed in three categories by the Breakthrough Prize Board in recognition of scientific advances. The awards are part of several "Breakthrough" initiatives founded and funded by Yuri Milner and his wife Julia Milner, along with Breakthrough Initiatives and Breakthrough Junior Challenge.
The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics is an annual award of the Breakthrough Prize series announced in 2013.
Hiranya Vajramani Peiris is a British astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, where she holds the Professorship of Astrophysics (1909). She is best known for her work on the cosmic microwave background radiation, and interdisciplinary links between cosmology and high-energy physics. She was one of 27 scientists who received the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2018 for their "detailed maps of the early universe".
Samaya Michiko Nissanke is an astrophysicist, associate professor in gravitational wave and multi-messenger astrophysics and the spokesperson for the GRAPPA Centre for Excellence in Gravitation and Astroparticle Physics at the University of Amsterdam. She works on gravitational-wave astrophysics and has played a founding role in the emerging field of multi-messenger astronomy. She played a leading role in the discovery paper of the first binary neutron star merger, GW170817, seen in gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation.
Marina Huerta is an Argentinian theoretical physicist and a physics professor. She is known for her work on quantum entropy in quantum field theory. She has provided a new interpretation of the Bekenstein bound. As of 2020, she has 29 peer-reviewed publications with more than 2000 citations.
Ronen Eldan is an Israeli mathematician. Eldan is a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science working on probability theory, mathematical analysis, theoretical computer science and the theory of machine learning. He received the 2018 Erdős Prize, the 2022 Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists and the 2023 New Horizons Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. He was a speaker at the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians.
Rana X. Adhikari is an American experimental physicist. He is a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and an associate faculty member of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (ICTS-TIFR).
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was jointly awarded to the American physiologist David Julius and Armenian-American neuroscientist Ardem Patapoutian "for the discovery of receptors for temperature and touch." During the award ceremony on December 10, 2021, Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet member Patrik Ernfors expressed:
"The 2021 Nobel Prize laureates have explained fundamental mechanisms underpinning how we sense the world within and around us. Our temperature and touch sensors are used all the time in every day of our lives. They continuously keep us updated about our environment, and without them even the simplest of our daily tasks would be impossible to perform."
Pascal Mayer is a French biophysicist and entrepreneur specializing in biomolecular analyses for diagnostics, predictive medicine and drug discovery.
Laura Pérez is an astronomer and assistant professor at the University of Chile. She researches the formation and evolution of planetary systems to understand how the solar system was formed. She is one of the winners of the 2024 New Horizons Prize in Physics Breakthrough Prize, for her research into dust traps in young star formation, giving insight into a long-standing mystery in planet formation.