“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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