NEW YORK, April 6, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Companies and inventors from around the world filed 199,264 patent applications at the European Patent Office (EPO) last year, according to the Patent Index 2024 published today. The high level of patenting activity was on a par with the previous year (2023: 199 452, -0.1%), following three years of significant growth. Patent applications from Europe, including all 39 EPO member states, rose by 0.3%, while those from outside Europe fell slightly (-0.4%).

“Despite political and economic uncertainties, European companies and inventors filed more patents last year, underlining their technological prowess and their continued investment in R&D,” said EPO President António Campinos. “The EPO’s patent data is a clear roadmap for industry, policy, and investment priorities. As the Draghi and Letta reports warn, to stay competitive globally, Europe must enhance its innovation ecosystem and do more to help inventors scale up and commercialise their inventions, especially in critical areas such as green technologies, AI and semiconductors.”

Computer technology takes the lead

Computer technology, which includes areas of AI such as machine learning and pattern recognition, led for the first time, with 16,815 patent applications in 2024. Electrical machinery, apparatus, energy posted the strongest growth last year (+8.9% on 2023), driven by advances in clean energy technologies, particularly battery innovation (+24.0%).

Global  trends

The United States maintained its position as the top country of origin for European patent applications, followed by Germany, Japan, China, and the Republic of Korea. EPO member states accounted for 43% of filings, while 57% came from outside Europe (see graph Origin of applications). Notably, R. Korea saw the strongest growth (+4.2%), China saw a 0.5% increase, while companies and inventors from the US (-0.8%) and Japan (-2.4%) filed fewer applications.

Diverse sources of innovation: Large companies are major contributors

Samsung was the new top applicant at the EPO in 2024 (having last topped the ranking in 2020), Huawei dropped to second, followed by LG, Qualcomm and RTX. The top 10 includes four companies from Europe, two from R. Korea, two from the US, and one from each of China and Japan.

Small companies use patent system to drive innovation

In 2024, 22% of patent applications to the EPO from Europe came from individual inventors or SMEs (companies with fewer than 250 employees), with another 7% from universities and public research organisations (see graph Breakdown of applicants by category). This highlights the patent system’s appeal to smaller entities, further strengthened by the EPO’s April 2024 fee reductions for micro-enterprises, individuals, non-profits, universities, and research institutions. 

One in four patent applications includes a woman inventor

In 2024, 25% of all patent applications to the EPO coming from Europe named at least one woman as an inventor. Among major filing countries (over 2,000 applications), Spain led with 42%, followed by Belgium (32%) and France (31%).

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SOURCE European Patent Office (EPO)

“Oscars® of Science” Awards Six $3 Million Prizes

GLP-1 Diabetes and Obesity Discovery | Multiple Sclerosis Causes and Treatments | DNA Editing

Exploration of Nature at Shortest Distances 

Proof of Geometric Langlands Conjecture

Special Prize Awarded to Giant of Theoretical Physics

Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Awarded to Daniel J. Drucker, Joel Habener, Jens Juul Holst, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen and Svetlana Mojsov; Alberto Ascherio and Stephen L. Hauser; and David R. Liu

Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics Awarded to More than 13,000 Researchers from ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb Experiments at CERN

Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics Awarded to Dennis Gaitsgory

Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics Awarded to Gerardus ‘t Hooft

Six New Horizons Prizes Awarded for Early-Career Achievements in Physics and Mathematics

Three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes Awarded to Women Mathematicians
for Early-Career Work

Laureates Announced and Honored at Annual Breakthrough Prize Ceremony in Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES, April 5, 2025 /CNW/ — The Breakthrough Prize Foundation today announced the winners of the 2025 Breakthrough Prizes, honoring scientists driving remarkable discoveries in gene editing, human diseases, the fundamental particles of the Universe and its underlying mathematical principles.

The Breakthrough Prize – popularly known as the “Oscars® of Science” – was created to celebrate the wonders of our scientific age by founding sponsors Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki.

Six Breakthrough Prizes of $3 million each were awarded in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics, and Mathematics. In addition, the foundation announced eight early-career physicists and mathematicians are sharing six $100,000 New Horizons Prizes. Three women mathematicians recently completing PhDs are each receiving a $50,000 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize. This year’s prize money totals $18.75 million, bringing the amount conferred over the 14 years of the Breakthrough Prize to more than $326 million.

“This year’s Breakthrough Prize laureates have made amazing strides – including treatments for major diseases affecting millions of people worldwide – showing once again the transformative power of curiosity-driven basic science.”
– Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg

“The questions these laureates are asking are among the deepest questions there are – about the workings of life, the nature of the Universe and the abstract landscapes of mathematics. It’s inspiring to see scientists seeking and finding answers to these questions.”
– Yuri Milner

“The breakthroughs being recognized this year are extraordinary – including, in my own field, amazing gene-editing technologies that are already having a big impact. I’m excited to learn more about the scientists’ ideas across all the fields.” 
– Anne Wojcicki

Life Sciences

Daniel J. Drucker, Joel Habener, Jens Juul Holst, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen and Svetlana Mojsov share the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. These five scientists’ complementary contributions – from basic hormone discovery through physiological understanding to pharmaceutical development – have led to highly effective drugs for diabetes and obesity, ushering in a new era of GLP-1 medicines for cardiometabolic disorders. Between them their breakthroughs include: the discovery of the gene encoding the GLP-1 hormone; the synthesis, isolation and characterization of the hormone’s biologically active forms; the demonstration that it is produced in the gut and stimulates insulin production; elucidation of its broader physiological roles, including control of appetite and energy homeostasis; the development of a more stable version of the hormone that continues to act in the body for days rather than hours; and its translation into a new class of drugs that is transforming the treatment of metabolic diseases affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Stephen L. Hauser and Alberto Ascherio share the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. The two researchers have transformed the understanding and treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS), a debilitating neurodegenerative disease in which the immune system attacks the insulating protein around nerve fibers. Among other contributions, Hauser overturned the scientific consensus on the mechanism of MS, identifying the immune system’s B cells as the primary driver of damage to nerve cells. He was also instrumental in the development and testing of B cell-depleting therapies, which have revolutionized modern treatment of the disease. Meanwhile, through painstaking long-term epidemiological analysis, Ascherio discovered the necessary condition for getting MS: infection with the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). The majority of the population carries this pathogen, normally without severe effects, but Ascherio showed that contracting it raises the risk of developing MS by a factor of 32. This work opens the possibility of treating MS with antiviral drugs, and for the development of a vaccine for EBV that could effectively prevent MS altogether.

David R. Liu is awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing two powerful, widely used gene-editing technologies. These technologies are engineered molecular machines that correct mutations in our DNA that cause genetic diseases in patients. Importantly, they do not require cutting the DNA double-helix, and thus lead to fewer unwanted outcomes. In 2016 Liu’s lab developed base editing, which corrects the single-letter “misspellings” that constitute about 30 percent of mutations known to cause genetic diseases. Then in 2019 his lab invented prime editing, which replaces whole stretches of defective DNA with a corrected version, and in principle could be used to repair nearly all disease-causing mutations. These technologies have already been distributed more than 20,000 times to labs around the world, resulting in thousands of published advances in research, agriculture, and biomedicine. In animals, base editing and prime editing have successfully corrected mutations to rescue blood diseases such as sickle-cell disease and beta-thalassemia, neurological disorders such as ALS and spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), muscle diseases such as muscular dystrophy and cardiomyopathies, genetic forms of blindness, genetic forms of hearing loss, several metabolic disorders, and progeria, a premature aging disease. At least 15 base editing and prime editing clinical trials have begun in five countries, with beneficial and, in some cases, life-saving results already confirmed in patients for the treatment of T-cell leukemia, sickle-cell disease, beta-thalassemia, and high cholesterol.

Fundamental Physics

The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics is awarded to thousands of researchers from more than 70 countries representing four experimental collaborations at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb.

The $3 million prize is allocated to ATLAS ($1 million); CMS ($1 million), ALICE ($500,000) and LHCb ($500,000), in recognition of 13,508 co-authors of publications based on LHC Run-2 data released between 2015 and July 15, 2024. [ATLAS – 5,345 researchers; CMS – 4,550; ALICE – 1,869; LHCb – 1,744]. 

In consultation with the leaders of the experiments, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation will donate 100 percent of the prize funds to the CERN & Society Foundation. The prize money will be used by the collaborations to offer grants for doctoral students from member institutes to spend research time at CERN, giving the students experience working at the forefront of science and new expertise to bring back to their home countries and regions.

The four experiments are recognized for testing the modern theory of particle physics – the Standard Model – and other theories describing physics that might lie beyond it to high precision. This includes precisely measuring properties of the Higgs boson and elucidating the mechanism by which the Higgs field gives mass to elementary particles; probing extremely rare particle interactions, and exotic states of matter that existed in the first moments of the Universe; discovering more than 72 new hadrons and measuring subtle differences between matter and antimatter particles; and setting strong bounds on possibilities for new physics beyond the Standard Model, including dark matter, supersymmetry and hidden extra dimensions. ATLAS and CMS are general-purpose experiments, which pursue the full program of exploration offered by the LHC’s high-energy and high-intensity proton and ion beams. They synchronously announced the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 and continue to investigate its properties. ALICE studies the quark-gluon plasma, a state of extremely hot and dense matter that existed in the first microseconds after the Big Bang. And LHCb explores minute differences between matter and antimatter, violation of fundamental symmetries, and the complex spectra of composite particles (“hadrons”) made of heavy and light quarks. By performing these extraordinarily precise and delicate tests, the LHC experiments have pushed the boundaries of fundamental physics to unprecedented limits.

Mathematics

Dennis Gaitsgory wins the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics for his central role in the proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture. The Langlands program is a broad research program spanning several fields of mathematics. It grew out of a series of conjectures proposing precise connections between seemingly disparate mathematical concepts. Such connections are powerful tools; for example, the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem reduces to a particular instance of the Langlands conjecture. These Langlands program equivalences can be thought of as generalizations of the Fourier transform, a tool that relates waves to frequency spectrums and has widespread uses from seismology to sound engineering. In the case of the geometric Langlands conjecture, the proposed one-to-one correspondence is between two very different sets of objects, analogous to these spectrums and waves: on the spectrum side are abstract algebraic objects called representations of the fundamental group, which capture information about the kinds of loop that can wrap around certain complex surfaces; on the “wave” side are sheaves, which, loosely speaking, are rules assigning vector spaces to points on a surface. Gaitsgory has dedicated much of the last 30 years to the geometric Langlands conjecture. In 2013 he wrote an outline of the steps required for a proof, and after more than a decade of intensive research in 2024 he and his colleagues published the full proof, comprising over 800 pages spread over 5 papers. This is a monumental advance, expected to have deep implications in other areas of mathematics too, including number theory, algebraic geometry and mathematical physics.

Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

Gerard ‘t Hooft, winner of the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, is one of the world’s most pre-eminent theoretical physicists. In the early 1970s he made crucial contributions to the foundations of what would later become known as the Standard Model of the subatomic particles. He proved that Yang-Mills theories (the mathematical framework underlying theories of both the weak and strong nuclear forces) make sense when treated quantum mechanically – that they can give finite, calculable results rather than meaningless infinities – thus validating theories which became central to the Standard Model. He made several crucial contributions to understanding the theory of the strong force, including resolving a major problem involving the masses of particles through special field configurations called instantons; he developed new mathematical tools for studying strongly interacting quarks; and he introduced the fruitful approach of studying the strong force by imagining it is mediated by many more varieties of quarks and gluons than it actually is. These and other contributions helped establish the Standard Model as a workable theory and provided powerful tools for calculating its predictions. ‘t Hooft has studied the quantum effects that can explain how information is processed in black holes, which led to the development of the holographic principle in cosmology, and possibly to new alternative ways to interpret quantum mechanics. 

New Horizons in Physics Prize

This year’s New Horizons in Physics Prizes honor early-career researchers across a wide range of fields. In atomic physics, Waseem Bakr has created quantum gas microscopes that can image individual atoms confined in an optical lattice, advancing the study of strongly interacting quantum systems. In quantum information, a field at the fertile intersection of physics, mathematics and computer science, Jeongwan Haah has developed models of emergent quantum systems –macroscopic systems exhibiting quantum behavior, whose potential applications include quantum computing; these models include ‘Haah’s code’, which has opened the field of a class of quasi-particles called fractons. And in astronomy, Sebastiaan Haffert, Rebecca Jensen-Clem and Maaike van Kooten have designed and enabled novel techniques for extreme adaptive optics, which are systems that compensate for the effects of Earth’s atmosphere on light reaching terrestrial telescopes. Their work promises to enable the direct detection of the smallest exoplanets.

New Horizons in Mathematics Prize

Modern physics and higher mathematics share intimate connections, and it is notable that the research areas of all three of this year’s New Horizons in Mathematics Prize winners have links to quantum physics. Ewain Gwynne is recognized for his work in conformal probability, which studies probabilistic objects such as random curves and surfaces. John Pardon has produced a number of important results in geometry and topology, particularly in the field of symplectic geometry and pseudo-holomorphic curves, which are certain types of smooth surfaces in manifolds. Sam Raskin has played a significant role in the major recent progress on the geometric Langlands program (see Mathematics section above), including the final proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture in characteristic 0.

Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize

The Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize is awarded to outstanding women mathematicians who have recently completed their PhDs. Si Ying Lee has found a new approach to an important problem in the Langlands program (see Mathematics section above), succeeding in reducing it to a local problem. Rajula Srivastava has made progress in a challenging area at the intersection of harmonic analysis and number theory. Her work focuses on bounding the number of lattice points one can find near a given smooth surface, with important applications to Diophantine approximation in higher dimensions. Ewin Tang has invented quantum computing algorithms for machine learning. She also proved that certain calculations, which quantum algorithms were widely considered to be exponentially faster at solving, can actually be solved in comparable time by a normal (non-quantum) computer. 

Citations for 2025 Laureates

2025 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences

Daniel J. Drucker
Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health, and University of Toronto

Joel Habener 
Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University

Jens Juul Holst 
Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research and the Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Copenhagen

Lotte Bjerre Knudsen
Novo Nordisk

Svetlana Mojsov
Rockefeller University

For the discovery and characterization of GLP-1 and revealing its physiology and potential in treating diabetes and obesity.

2025 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences

Alberto Ascherio
Harvard University

Stephen L. Hauser
University of California, San Francisco

For establishing the role of B cells in multiple sclerosis and developing B-cell based treatments, and for revealing that Epstein-Barr virus infection is the leading risk for multiple sclerosis.

2025 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences

David R. Liu
Merkin Institute for Transformative Technologies in Healthcare at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Harvard University, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute

For developing base editing and prime editing, technologies that edit the DNA of living systems without cutting the DNA double helix, and rewrite segments of genes at their native locations, enabling the correction or replacement of virtually any mutation.

2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

The ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb Collaborations at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider

For detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties confirming the symmetry-breaking mechanism of mass generation, the discovery of new strongly interacting particles, the study of rare processes and matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the exploration of nature at the shortest distances and most extreme conditions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

The $3 million prize is allocated to ATLAS ($1 million); CMS ($1 million), ALICE ($500,000) and LHCb ($500,000), in recognition of 13,508 co-authors of publications based on LHC Run-2 data released between 2015 and July 15, 2024. [ATLAS – 5,345 researchers; CMS – 4,550; ALICE – 1,869; LHCb – 1,744]. 

In consultation with the leaders of the experiments, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation will donate 100 percent of the prize funds to the CERN & Society Foundation. The prize money will be used by the collaborations to offer grants for doctoral students from member institutes to spend research time at CERN, giving the students experience working at the forefront of science and new expertise to bring back to their home countries and regions.

The names of each prizewinner can be found at https://breakthroughprize.org/Laureates/1.

2025 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

Gerardus ‘t Hooft
Utrecht University
For fundamental insights into gauge theory and the standard model.

2025 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics

Dennis Gaitsgory
Max Planck Institute for Mathematics
For foundational works and numerous breakthrough contributions to the geometric Langlands program and its quantum version; in particular, the development of the derived algebraic geometry approach and the proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture in characteristic 0.

2025 New Horizons in Mathematics Prize

Ewain Gwynne
University of Chicago
For contributions to conformal probability, in particular to the understanding of the LQG metric.

John Pardon
Stony Brook University
For contributions to symplectic topology and other areas of geometry and topology.

Sam Raskin
Yale University
For contributions to the geometric Langlands program, including the theory of the Whittaker model and the proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture in characteristic 0.

2025 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize

Si Ying Lee
Stanford University
(PhD Harvard University 2022)
For contributions to the theory of Shimura varieties.

Rajula Srivastava
University of Bonn and Max Planck Institute for Mathematics
(PhD University of Wisconsin 2022)
For contributions in harmonic analysis and analytic number theory, including contributions to the problem of counting rational points near smooth manifolds.

Ewin Tang
University of California, Berkeley
(PhD University of Washington 2023)
For developing classical analogs of quantum algorithms for machine learning and linear algebra, and for advances in quantum machine learning on quantum data.

2025 New Horizons in Physics Prize

Waseem Bakr
Princeton University
For the realization of quantum gas microscopes for atoms and molecules, providing a microscopic view on correlations and transport in strongly interacting quantum systems.

2025 New Horizons in Physics Prize

Jeongwan Haah
Stanford University
For the discovery of Haah’s code, in which fractal conservation laws emerge, and other models bringing discrete mathematical structures to physics

2025 New Horizons in Physics Prize

Sebastiaan Haffert 
Leiden University, Leiden Observatory and University of Arizona, Steward Observatory

Rebecca Jensen-Clem
University of California, Santa Cruz 

Maaike van Kooten
National Research Council Canada
For demonstrating new extreme adaptive optics techniques that will allow the direct detection of the smallest exoplanets.

About The Breakthrough Prize
For the 13th 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 and Mathematics. 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.

The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki and have been sponsored by foundations established by them. Selection Committees composed of previous Breakthrough Prize laureates in each field choose the winners. Information on the Breakthrough Prize is available at https://breakthroughprize.org.

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SOURCE The Breakthrough Prize

Jasmine Eyal, Age 16, of Singapore, Receives Top Honors and $400,000 in Education Prizes for her Original Video Explaining Mechanogenetic Cellular Engineering

LOS ANGELES, April 5, 2025 /CNW/ — The Breakthrough Prize Foundation today announced Singapore-based Jasmine Eyal as winner of the 10th annual Breakthrough Junior Challenge, a global science video competition designed to inspire creative thinking and communications skills around fundamental concepts in the life sciences, physics, and mathematics.

The Breakthrough Junior Challenge will award a total of $400,000 in educational prizes to Jasmine and her science teacher Julie Li-Eyal. Jasmine will receive a $250,000 college scholarship. In her role as science teacher, Ms. Li-Eyal will receive a $50,000 prize. The prize also includes a state-of-the-art science lab designed by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory valued at $100,000, which will be given to Community High School, part of the Beginning with Children Education Network in Brooklyn, NY.

Jasmine was honored alongside the 2025 Breakthrough Prize laureates at The Breakthrough Prize Ceremony in Los Angeles.

“This is the tenth year of the Junior Challenge, and every year I’m very impressed by the quality of the submissions,” said Julia Milner, co-founder of the Breakthrough Prize. “Jasmine’s video is a great example of where curiosity can lead you. She was researching potential treatments for her grandma’s diabetes, and it inspired her to explain the idea in a really smart, original and funny way.”

Jasmine’s winning entry explains mechanogenetic cellular engineering, an innovative biotechnology, exploring how it works and its potential as a medical tool in the future. The short film can be seen here. The entry marks Jasmine’s second time as a competition finalist, having entered the Breakthrough Junior Challenge in 2023.

“I am so honored to receive this award. My grandma, Popo, struggles with Type 1 diabetes, and I was inspired to learn more about this field of biology because of its potential to revolutionize health and medicine, treat chronic illnesses, and improve health outcomes,” said Jasmine. “The intersection of biology and technology in cellular engineering is an area where breakthroughs can dramatically improve the quality of life for countless individuals, including Popo.”   

Her grandmother, who co-stars in the video, was the first person to share with Jasmine the news of her win, in a video which can be seen here.

“I was so pleased when Jasmine asked me to participate in her entry and was delighted to be the one to share the news with her,” said Anne Li, Jasmine’s grandmother. “Jasmine has been an enthusiastic learner her entire life, and her mother has been an outstanding homeschool educator, connecting everyday experiences to science. She encourages Jasmine to approach the world with scientific curiosity, teaching her to hypothesize, experiment, and analyze results critically.”

“We are incredibly grateful for this generous gift, which will be a true blessing for our students and the entire Community High School family,” said Esosa Ogbahon, Superintendent of Beginning with Children and Community High School Principal. “Science is a critical and ever-evolving field and having access to a dedicated lab will allow our students to engage in hands-on learning, deepen their curiosity, and explore the endless possibilities that science offers. This opportunity will not only enrich our curriculum but also inspire the next generation of scientists, innovators, and problem-solvers.” 

The Breakthrough Junior Challenge is a global initiative to develop and demonstrate young people’s knowledge of science and scientific principles; generate excitement in these fields; support STEM career choices; and engage the imagination and interest of the public-at-large in key concepts of fundamental science.  Each year, students ages 13-18 are invited to create original videos (up to two minutes in length) that illustrate a concept or theory in life sciences, physics or mathematics. Submissions are evaluated based on the students’ ability to communicate complex scientific ideas in the most engaging, illuminating and imaginative ways.

“Jasmine and all the incredible finalists demonstrate a passion for learning – and a passion for sharing learning with others,” said Sal Khan. “Khan Academy is proud to partner with the Challenge to encourage and support students around the world as they explore deep concepts in science and math.”

This year, the Breakthrough Junior Challenge attracted more than 2,300 applicants from around the world. Submissions were narrowed down to 30 semifinalists, which represented the top submissions after two rounds of judging: first, a mandatory peer review, followed by an evaluation panel of judges. Sixteen finalists were selected in September 2024.

Now in its 10th year, the Breakthrough Junior Challenge has attracted more than 100,000 students, parents and teachers, and received applications from more than 30,000 students from over 200 countries across the globe, including Canada, India, Mauritius, Peru, the Philippines, Singapore, and the United States. The Challenge has awarded more than $2.5 million in college scholarships, $1 million for science labs, and $500,000 in awards to inspiring teachers in science or math. Previous winners have created videos about the Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Circadian Rhythms, Neutrino Astronomy, Quantum Physics, and more. Award alumni have gone on to attend institutions including MIT, Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford. 

This year’s Selection Committee was comprised of: Ian Agol, professor of mathematics, University of California, Berkeley, and Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics laureate; Rachel Crane, former space and science correspondent, CNN; Pascale Ehrenfreund, PhD, president, Committee on Space Research COSPAR; John Grunsfeld, PhD, NASA astronaut and administrator; Mae Jemison, science literacy expert, former astronaut, and principal, 100 Year Starship; Jeffrey W. Kelly, professor of chemistry, Scripps Research Institute and Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences laureate; Scott Kelly, retired NASA astronaut; Salman Khan, founder and CEO, Khan Academy; Ijad Madisch, CEO, co-founder, ResearchGate; Samaya Nissanke, University of Amsterdam, Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics laureate; Nicole Stott, NASA astronaut; Andrew Strominger, professor of physics, Harvard University, and Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics laureate; Terence Tao, UCLA professor and Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics laureate; Esther Wojcicki, founder, Palo Alto High Media Arts Center; Richard Youle, National Institutes of Health, and Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences laureate; and S. Pete Worden, chairman, Breakthrough Prize Foundation and executive director, Breakthrough StarShot.

Submissions for the 2025 Breakthrough Challenge open on May 1st. 

Partners

The Breakthrough Junior Challenge
The Breakthrough Junior Challenge, founded by Julia and Yuri Milner, is a global science video competition, aiming to develop and demonstrate young people’s knowledge of science and scientific principles and communications skills; generate excitement in these fields; support STEM career choices; and engage the imagination and interest of the public-at-large in key concepts of fundamental science.

The Breakthrough Prize
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.

The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki. The Prizes have been sponsored by the personal foundations established by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri 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.

About Khan Academy
Khan Academy is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. Khan Academy is piloting an AI guide called Khanmigo that is a tutor and teaching assistant. Khanmigo is integrated into a platform that includes practice problems, videos and articles that cover a range of subjects. Khan Academy’s free app for young children ages two to eight is Khan Academy Kids. The organization partners with school districts across the country that serve students who are historically under-resourced. Districts use Khan Academy Districts, MAP Accelerator and Khan Academy Kids to help teachers differentiate instruction. Worldwide, more than 160 million registered learners have used Khan Academy in 190 countries and 51 languages. For more information, please see research findings about Khan Academy and our press center.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL)
The Breakthrough Prize Lab for the winning student’s school is designed in partnership with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). Founded in 1890, CSHL is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit that powers transformation discoveries in cancer, neuroscience, plant biology, artificial intelligence, and quantitative biology. Merging world-renowned science and education divisions, CSHL nurtures a culture of curiosity, discovery, and innovation to make lives better. CSHL’s DNA Learning Center (DNALC) is the largest provider of hands-on instruction in genetics and biotechnology – operating five centers in the NY metro area, encompassing 20 teaching and bioinformatics labs. Each year 36,000 middle and high school students conduct experiments with DNALC faculty; an additional 2,000 participate in intensive, 5-day summer camps and mentored research projects. For more information visit www.cshl.edu.

Contact
For more information, including competition rules, video submission guidelines and queries, go to: breakthroughjuniorchallenge.org.

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SOURCE The Breakthrough Prize