Celebrating Innovation: The 2025 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony Highlights Scientific Achievements

Aurora Skye4 days agoLast Updated: 11 April 2025

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2025 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony Puts Science in the Spotlight

This year’s Breakthrough Prize—often referred to as the “Oscars of Science”—brought together the world’s leading scientists and Hollywood’s top stars to celebrate remarkable achievements and inspire the next generation of scientists. The event beautifully merged the realms of science, pop culture, and technology.

Founded in 2012 by tech visionaries Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki, the Breakthrough Prize was established to honor the wonders of our advanced scientific era. To date, it stands as the world’s largest science award, presenting six prizes of $3 million each—approximately three times the size of the Nobel Prize purse. The initiative aims to elevate the standing of scientific research within popular culture, drawing a celebrity guest list reminiscent of the Academy Awards.

The Breakthrough Prize recognizes outstanding achievements in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics, and Mathematics. This year, it awarded eight early-career physicists and mathematicians with six New Horizons Prizes, each valued at $100,000, as well as three women mathematicians who received the $50,000 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize. In total, the organization distributed $18.75 million in prize funds this year, raising the cumulative amount granted over the past 14 years to more than $326 million.

Hosted by actor and comedian James Corden, this year’s ceremony featured celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Alicia Keys, Leonardo DiCaprio, Drew Barrymore, and Mr. Beast, alongside tech entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The 2025 awards specifically honored individuals making groundbreaking discoveries in gene editing, human diseases, and the fundamental particles of the universe along with their mathematical principles.

In the Life Sciences category, Daniel J. Drucker, Joel Habener, Jens Juul Holst, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, and Svetlana Mojsov were recognized for their discoveries that have led to effective drugs for diabetes and obesity. Their work has ushered in a new era of GLP-1 medications for cardiometabolic disorders, significantly transforming the treatment landscape for metabolic diseases affecting millions globally.

Stephen L. Hauser and Alberto Ascherio have made pivotal contributions to the understanding and treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS), a serious neurodegenerative condition where the immune system attacks the protective covering around nerve fibers. Hauser redefined the understanding of the disease’s mechanisms and advanced modern MS treatment through B-cell depleting therapies, while Ascherio identified Epstein-Barr virus infection as the primary risk factor for developing MS.

The final Life Science laureate, David R. Liu, developed two powerful gene-editing technologies that can correct mutations in DNA—without severing the double helix—that lead to genetic diseases. His innovations are already in use in laboratories worldwide, facilitating thousands of advancements in research, biomedicine, and agriculture, with life-saving outcomes in treating conditions such as T-cell leukemia, sickle cell disease, beta-thalassemia, and high cholesterol.

“This year’s Breakthrough Prize laureates have made astounding strides—developing treatments for major diseases affecting millions worldwide—demonstrating the transformative power of curiosity-driven basic science,” said Chan and Zuckerberg, Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

The Fundamental Physics award this year was shared by thousands of researchers across 70 countries, representing four experimental collaborations at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider: ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb. These collaborations were recognized for their efforts in testing the modern theory of particle physics and setting strong boundaries regarding new physics related to dark matter, supersymmetry, and hidden extra dimensions. They precisely measured properties of the Higgs boson and explored differences between matter and antimatter, pushing the frontiers of fundamental physics further than ever before. Additionally, a Special Breakthrough Prize was awarded to Gerard ‘t Hooft, a leading theoretical physicist.

Dennis Gaitsgory was the sole Mathematics Breakthrough Prize winner this year for his contributions to the proof of the Langlands Program, a powerful series of conjectures that propose precise connections between seemingly disparate mathematical concepts. The geometric Langlands conjecture, considered a generalization of the Fourier transform—a tool that relates waves to frequency—proposes a correspondence between two distinct sets of objects. This represents a monumental advancement in the field to which Gaitsgory has dedicated much of the last 30 years.

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