Breakthrough Prize Seeks Nominations for 2021
This announcement is adapted from a Breakthrough Prize press release:
The public nomination period for the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics is now open. The prizes will be awarded in late 2020, during a live, globally televised awards ceremony in Silicon Valley. Nominations can be submitted online through 1 April 2020. While self-nominations are prohibited, anyone may nominate another person. The nomination forms and rules are available at breakthroughprize.org.
For the ninth year, the Breakthrough Prize, recognized as the world’s largest science prize, will honor top scientists, handing out up to four prizes in life sciences, one in fundamental physics, and one in mathematics. Each prize comes with a $3 million award. There will also be up to six New Horizons Prizes, each for $100,000, presented to promising early-career researchers in the fields of physics and mathematics.
The Breakthrough Prize, dubbed "The Oscars of Science," hosts a gala awards ceremony to celebrate the laureates’ achievements and to foster broad popular support for scientific endeavors and inspire the next generation of scientists. As part of the schedule, the prizewinners also engage in a program of lectures and discussions at a daylong symposium after the ceremony.
The Breakthrough Prizes are sponsored by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Pony Ma, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki. Selection committees are composed of previous Breakthrough Prize laureates, who select the winners from the list of candidates generated during the nomination period.
Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
One 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics ($3 million) will recognize an individual or group that has made profound contributions to human knowledge. It is open to all physicists — theoretical, mathematical, and experimental — working on the deepest mysteries of the universe. The prize can be shared among any number of scientists. Nominations are also open for the New Horizons in Physics Prize, which will include up to three $100,000 awards for early career researchers who have already produced important work in their fields.
The selection committee for the 2021 physics prizes includes Nima Arkani-Hamed, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Charles L. Bennett, Sheperd Doeleman, Lyn Evans, Michael B. Green, Alan Guth, Joseph Incandela, Takaaki Kajita, Charles Kane, Alexei Kitaev, Maxim Kontsevich, Andrei Linde, Arthur McDonald, Juan Maldacena, Eugene Mele, Lyman Page, Saul Perlmutter, Alexander Polyakov, Adam Riess, John H. Schwarz, Nathan Seiberg, Ashoke Sen, David N. Spergel, Andrew Strominger, Kip S. Thorne, Cumrun Vafa, Yifang Wang, Rainer Weiss, and Edward Witten.