Breakthrough Prize Ceremony: Scientists and Stars Come Together in Hollywood

Photo: Breakthrough/ Facebook

The Breakthrough Prize ceremony, which honors “scientists changing the world” with sizable cash prizes, came to Hollywood for the first time on Saturday night, having previously been held in San Francisco — and the world’s top innovators were surrounded by more stars than one can see in a telescope, as per the report by The Hollywood Reporter.

The ninth edition of the event — which was founded and is financially supported by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia Milner and Yuri Milner and Anne Wojcicki, and has come to be known as “the Oscars of science” — took place on the open-air roof of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

James Corden hosted, as has been the case in previous years; presenters included Kristen Bell, Lily Collins, Danny DeVito, Robert Downey Jr. (alongside Zuckerberg), Gal Gadot, Ashton Kutcher, Brie Larson, Edward Norton, Leslie Odom Jr., Chris Pine and Chloe Zhao; John Legend and will.i.am performed; and audience members included Christina Aguilera, Vin Diesel, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Mila Kunis, Lionel Richie and Maria Sharapova.

But the real toasts of the night were the scientists, such as Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó, whose work was fundamental in developing mRNA vaccines against COVID, and who were greeted with a lengthy standing ovation when they took the stage to collect the Breakthrough Prize in Life Science that they had been chosen for in 2022. (There was no in-person Breakthrough Prize event in 2020, 2021 or 2022 due to the pandemic.)

At this year’s ceremony, which was produced by Don Mischer of Don Mischer Productions with scenic design by Basil Walter of BW Architects, a total of $15.75 million was presented to Breakthrough Prize honorees.

The event’s highest honors are Breakthrough Prizes in three categories — fundamental physics, life sciences and mathematics — with each recipient receiving a $3 million cash prize for their contributions.

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 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.”

Additionally, 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.

The New Horizons in Physics Prizes were won by:

David Simmons-Duffin, California Institute of Technology

Anna Grassellino, Fermilab

Six scientists 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

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)