The 2023 Breakthrough Prizes Are Announced; $15.75 Million Awarded To The Winners

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation has announced the winners of its 2023 prizes, recognizing scholars in three categories — fundamental physics, mathematics, and life sciences – with the world’s most lucrative monetary awards for achievements in science.

At $3 million each, the prizes – sometimes referred to as the “Oscars of science” – were founded by Sergey Brin; Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg; Julia and Yuri Milner; and Anne Wojcicki, who have financially supported the foundation and its awards since their inception more than a decade ago.

The winners of the prizes are known as “laureates,” and as part of their recognition, they attend an award ceremony to celebrate their achievements and inspire the next generation of scientists. They also engage in a program of lectures and discussions and serve on selection committees to choose subsequent laureates.

Three 2023 Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences were awarded to:

• Clifford P. Brangwynne, Princeton University, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Marine Biological Laboratory; and Anthony A. Hyman, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics for their discovery of “a fundamental mechanism of cellular organization mediated by phase separation of proteins and RNA into membraneless liquid droplets.”
• Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, DeepMind; for “developing a deep learning AI method that rapidly and accurately predicts the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino acid sequence.”
• Emmanuel Mignot, Stanford University School of Medicine and Masashi Yanagisawa, University of Tsukuba; for “discovering that narcolepsy is caused by the loss of a small population of brain cells that make a wake-promoting substance, paving the way for the development of new treatments for sleep disorders.”

The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was shared by four individuals for foundational work in the field of quantum information:

• Charles H. Bennett, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
• Gilles Brassard, Université de Montréal
• David Deutsch, Oxford University
• Peter W. Shor, MIT

The 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics was awarded to:

• Daniel A. Spielman, Yale University for “contributions to theoretical computer science and mathematics, including to spectral graph theory, the Kadison-Singer problem, numerical linear algebra, optimization, and coding theory.”

___________

In addition to the main prizes, six New Horizons Prizes, each worth $100,000, were shared by 11 early-career scientists and mathematicians, selected for having an early, but substantial impact on their fields.

And three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes, each worth $50,000 each, were awarded to women mathematicians who have recently completed their PhDs and produced important results.

Three 2023 New Horizons in Physics Prizes were won by:

David Simmons-Duffin, California Institute of Technology

Anna Grassellino, Fermilab

Six scientists, who shared a New Horizons Prize for their development of optical tweezer arrays to be used in quantum information science, metrology, and molecular physics.

• Hannes Bernien , University of Chicago
• Manuel Endres, Caltech
• Adam M. Kaufman, JILA, National Institute of Standards and Technology and University of Colorado
• Kang-Kuen Ni, Harvard University
• Hannes Pichler, University of Innsbruck and Austrian Academy of Sciences
• Jeff Thompson, Princeton University

Three 2023 New Horizons in Mathematics Prizes were awarded to:

• Ana Caraiani, Imperial College London and University of Bonn;
• Ronen Eldan, Weizmann Institute of Science and Microsoft Research;
• James Maynard, Oxford University and Institute for Advanced Study.

The 2023 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes were awarded to:

• Maggie Miller, Stanford University and Clay Mathematics Institute (PhD Princeton University 2020);
• Jinyoung Park, Stanford University (PhD Rutgers University 2020);
• Vera Traub, University of Bonn (PhD University of Bonn 2020).

The Breakthrough Prize founders lauded this year’s winners for their outstanding contributions to basic science. “Congratulations to all of the Breakthrough Prize winners, whose incredible discoveries will pave the way for scientific discovery and spur innovation,” said Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Co-Founders and Co-CEOs Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg. “These laureates and early-career scientists are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in research and science, and we’re thrilled to honor their accomplishments.”

“Neurodegenerative disease breakthroughs, quantum computing, AI solving protein structure, and more…” said Sergey Brin, “These are incredible advances that deserve to be celebrated.”

“The laureates honored today embody the remarkable power of fundamental science,” said Yuri Milner, “both to reveal deep truths about the Universe, and to improve human lives.”

“The 2023 laureates have produced absolutely stellar science,” said Anne Wojcicki. “The creativity, ingenuity and sheer perseverance that went into this work is awe-inspiring.”