THE SHAW PRIZE
HONG KONG
WHO: Run Run Shaw, entertainment mogul, founder of Shaw Brothers Studio and TVB
WHAT: The annual Shaw Prize was founded by the late Run Run Shaw in 2002 with the aim of “furthering societal progress, enhancing quality of life, and enriching humanity’s spiritual civilisation,” and has been recognising brilliant minds in astronomy, life science and medicine, and mathematical sciences ever since. A cash prize of HK$9.3 million awaits laureates.
The award, presented in September each year, has become extremely prestigious because of the calibre of both the judges and the past winners. It has also become a good forecaster of the Nobel: to date, seven Shaw laureates have gone on to bag one. Past winners have included a trio of physicists in 2016 who helped conceive and design the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory; a physicist whose discovery of cosmic gravitational waves in 2015 provided further evidence for the existence of black holes and collisions between them; and, last year, two scientists whose detection of biological engines could lead to breakthroughs in the treatment of cancer and neurodegenerative disorders.