BREAKTHROUGH PRIZE
US
WHO: Yuri Milner, tech entrepreneur, venture capitalist and physicist, founder of investment firms Mail.ru Group and DST Global
WHAT: Established in 2012, the Breakthrough Prize, backed by the Breakthrough Foundation, awards six prizes each year: four for the life sciences, one for physics and one for mathematics. Each award comes with a cash payment of US$3 million, nearly three times the reward for a Nobel Prize. Milner and his wife, Julia, co-founded the award with Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan of Facebook, Google’s Sergey Brin, and Anne Wojcicki, founder of genome-testing company 23andme. The most recent addition is Tencent co-founder Pony Ma.
The ceremony—a lavish, televised event, complete with celebrities, tech entrepreneurs and star scientists, often called the Oscars of Science—takes place in December in Silicon Valley. Past recipients of the prize have included the late Stephen Hawking and seven Cern scientists whose leadership led to the discovery of the Higgs boson particle.
In 2015 the foundation created the Breakthrough Junior Challenge for teenagers, with the winner receiving a US$250,000 university scholarship, US$50,000 for the teacher who inspired them and a US$100,000 upgrade for their school’s science lab.