Winners Of The 2022 Breakthrough Prizes In Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics And Mathematics Announced
PR91576
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 9, 2021 /PRNewswire=KYODO JBN/ --
- $15.75 Million in Prizes Awarded for Discoveries Leading to Covid-19
Vaccines, Treatments For Neurological Diseases, Unprecedentedly Precise Quantum
Clocks, and Other Major Discoveries
- Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Awarded to Shankar Balasubramanian, David
Klenerman and Pascal Mayer ; Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman; and Jeffery W.
Kelly
- Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics Awarded to Takuro Mochizuki
- Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics Awarded to Hidetoshi Katori and Jun
Ye
- Six New Horizons Prizes Awarded for Early-Career Achievements in Physics and
Math
- Three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes Awarded to Women Mathematicians
for Early-Career Achievements
- Live, Televised Awards Ceremony Honoring Laureates Postponed Until 2022 Due
to Pandemic
The Breakthrough Prize Foundation and its founding sponsors – Sergey Brin,
Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki –
today announced the winners of the 10th annual Breakthrough Prizes, awarding a
total of $15.75 million to an esteemed group of laureates and early-career
scientists.
The Breakthrough Prize recognizes groundbreaking discoveries in Fundamental
Physics, Life Sciences and Mathematics. The world's largest science prize,
each of the five main Breakthrough Prizes is $3 million. Traditionally
celebrated during a live, televised awards ceremony that honors the laureates,
this year's program is postponed until 2022 due to the pandemic.
The scientific and medical response to Covid-19 has been unprecedented, and two
of this year's prizes are for breakthroughs that played a significant role in
that response. The innovative vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna
that have proven effective against the virus rely on decades of work by Katalin
Kariko and Drew Weissman. Convinced of the promise of mRNA therapies despite
widespread skepticism, they created a technology that is not only vital in the
fight against the coronavirus today, but holds vast promise for future vaccines
and treatments for a wide range of diseases including HIV, cancer, autoimmune
and genetic diseases.
Meanwhile, the almost immediate identification and characterization of the
virus, rapid development of vaccines, and real-time monitoring of new genetic
variants would have been impossible without the next generation sequencing
technologies invented by Shankar Balasubramanian, David Klenerman and Pascal
Mayer. Before their inventions, re-sequencing a full human genome could take
many months and cost millions of dollars; today, it can be done within a day at
the cost of around $600. This resulted in a revolution in biology, enabling the
revelation of unsuspected genetic diversity with major implications from cell
and microbiome biology to ecology, forensics and personalized medicine.
While Covid is a crisis, the struggle against neurodegenerative diseases is an
ever-present emergency. Jeffery W. Kelly has made a difference in the lives of
people suffering from amyloid diseases that affect the heart and nervous
system. He showed the mechanism by which a protein, transthyretin, unravels and
agglomerates into clusters that kill cells, tissues and ultimately patients. He
then conceived a molecular approach to stabilizing the protein, and after he
synthesized a thousand candidate molecules, one of the designed molecules had
the right structure to achieve this stabilization. He then helped develop it
into an effective drug, named tafamidis, that significantly slows the
progression of these diseases. In the process, he provided evidence for the
notion that protein aggregation causes neurodegeneration, which has relevance
for other neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's disease.
Since the dawn of science, improvements in precision measurement have led to
discoveries. Hidetoshi Katori and Jun Ye, working independently, have improved
the precision of time measurement by 3 orders of magnitude. Their techniques –
tabletop in scale – for using lasers to trap, cool and probe atoms, produce
quantum clocks so accurate that they would lose less than a second if operated
for 15 billion years. These optical lattice clocks have potential technological
applications from quantum computing to using the effects of Einstein's
relativity for seismology; and in fundamental research they can be used to
check theories like relativity, as well as to hunt for gravitational waves and
new physics such as dark matter.
While experimentalists probe the physical world with ever-increasing precision,
mathematicians explore the frontiers of mindbending abstract spaces. Takuro
Mochizuki works at the interface of algebraic geometry – where solutions to
systems of equations appear as geometric objects – and differential geometry –
where smooth surfaces unfold in multiple complex dimensions. Mochizuki overcame
immense technical and conceptual challenges to extend the boundaries of
knowledge deep into new terrain, extending the understanding of objects called
holonomic D-modules to include varieties with singularities – points where the
equations under study no longer make sense. In the process, he has given a
complete foundation to the field, solving all basic long-standing conjectures.
Beyond the main prizes, six New Horizons Prizes, each of $100,000, were
distributed between 13 early-career scientists and mathematicians who have
already made a substantial impact on their fields. In addition, three Maryam
Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes were awarded to early-career women
mathematicians.
Including the New Horizons and New Frontiers prizes for early-career
achievements, a total of $15.75 million is conferred this year, bringing the
total amount awarded to pioneering scientists and mathematicians throughout the
decade of the Prize's existence to $276.5 million.
Full citations can be found below.
2022 Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences
Jeffery W. Kelly
Scripps Research Institute
For elucidating the molecular basis of neurodegenerative and cardiac
transthyretin diseases, and for developing tafamidis, a drug that slows their
progression.
________________
Katalin Kariko
BioNTech and University of Pennsylvania
Drew Weissman
University of Pennsylvania
For engineering modified RNA technology which enabled rapid development of
effective COVID-19 vaccines.
________________
Shankar Balasubramanian
University of Cambridge
David Klenerman
University of Cambridge
Pascal Mayer
Alphanosos
For the development of a robust and affordable method to determine DNA
sequences on a massive scale, which has transformed the practice of science and
medicine.
________________
2022 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
Hidetoshi Katori
University of Tokyo and RIKEN
Jun Ye
National Institute of Standards and Technology and University of Colorado
For outstanding contributions to the invention and development of the optical
lattice clock, which enables precision tests of the fundamental laws of nature.
________________
2022 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics
Takuro Mochizuki
Kyoto University
For monumental work leading to a breakthrough in our understanding of the
theory of bundles with flat connections over algebraic varieties, including the
case of irregular singularities.
________________
2022 New Horizons in Physics Prize
Suchitra Sebastian
University of Cambridge
For high precision electronic and magnetic measurements that have profoundly
changed our understanding of high temperature superconductors and
unconventional insulators.
________________
Alessandra Corsi
Texas Tech University
Gregg Hallinan
California Institute of Technology
Mansi Manoj Kasliwal
California Institute of Technology
Raffaella Margutti
University of California, Berkeley
For leadership in laying foundations for electromagnetic observations of
sources of gravitational waves, and leadership in extracting rich information
from the first observed collision of two neutron stars.
________________
Dominic Else
Harvard University
Vedika Khemani
Stanford University
Haruki Watanabe
The University of Tokyo
Norman Y. Yao
University of California, Berkeley
For pioneering theoretical work formulating novel phases of non-equilibrium
quantum matter, including time crystals.
________________
2022 New Horizons in Mathematics Prize
Aaron Brown
Northwestern University
Sebastian Hurtado Salazar
University of Chicago
For contributions to the proof of Zimmer's conjecture.
________________
Jack Thorne
University of Cambridge
For transformative contributions to diverse areas of algebraic number theory,
and in particular for the proof, in collaboration with James Newton, of the
automorphy of all symmetric powers of a holomorphic modular newform.
________________
Jacob Tsimerman
University of Toronto
For outstanding work in analytic number theory and arithmetic geometry,
including breakthroughs on the André-Oort and Griffiths conjectures.
________________
2022 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize
Sarah Peluse
Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University (PhD Stanford University
2019)
For contributions to arithmetic combinatorics and analytic number theory,
particularly with regards to polynomial patterns in dense sets.
________________
Hong Wang
University of California, Los Angeles (PhD MIT 2019)
For advances on the restriction conjecture, the local smoothing conjecture, and
related problems.
________________
Yilin Wang
MIT (PhD ETH Zürich 2019)
For innovative and far-reaching work on the Loewner energy of planar curves.
________________
About The Breakthrough Prize
For the tenth year, the Breakthrough Prize, renowned as the "Oscars of
Science," recognizes the world's top scientists. Each prize is $3 million and
presented in the fields of Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics (one per year)
and Mathematics (one per year). In addition, up to three New Horizons in
Physics Prizes, up to three New Horizons in Mathematics Prizes and up to three
Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes are given out to early-career
researchers each year. Laureates attend a gala award ceremony designed to
celebrate their achievements and inspire the next generation of scientists. As
part of the ceremony schedule, they also engage in a program of lectures and
discussions.
The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark
Zuckerberg, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki. The Prizes have been
sponsored by the personal foundations established by Sergey Brin, Priscilla
Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Ma Huateng, Jack Ma, Yuri and Julia Milner and Anne
Wojcicki. Selection Committees composed of previous Breakthrough Prize
laureates in each field choose the winners. Information on the Breakthrough
Prize is available at breakthroughprize.org.
SOURCE The Breakthrough Prize
CONTACT: For media inquiries: media@breakthroughprize.org OR Rubenstein
Communications, Inc., New York, New York; Janet Wootten,
jwootten@rubenstein.com / +1-212 -843-8024; Kristen Bothwell,
kbothwell@rubenstein.com / +1-212-843-9227
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