Six $3 Million Prizes Awarded for Outstanding Discoveries in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics and Mathematics
Gene Therapies for Inherited Blindness, Sickle Cell Disease and Beta-Thalassemia
Discovery of Key Genetic Cause of ALS and Frontotemporal Dementia
Precision Measurement of Muon’s Magnetic Moment
Advances in Mathematics of Waves and Nonlinear Systems
Special Prize for Pioneer of Theory of Strong Nuclear Force
Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Awarded to Jean Bennett, Katherine A. High and Albert Maguire; Stuart H. Orkin and Swee Lay Thein; Rosa Rademakers and Bryan Traynor
Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics Awarded to Frank Merle
Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics Awarded to Muon g-2 Collaborations at CERN, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Fermilab
Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics Awarded to David J. Gross
Inaugural Vera Rubin New Frontiers Prize Awarded to Carolina Figueiredo
Six New Horizons Prizes Awarded for Early-Career Achievements in Physics and Mathematics
Three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes Awarded to Women Mathematicians for Early-Career Work
Laureates to be Celebrated Tonight at Breakthrough Prize Ceremony in Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES, April 19, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The Breakthrough Prize Foundation today announced the winners of the 2026 Breakthrough Prizes, honoring scientists whose discoveries are significantly driving growth of human knowledge. In the Life Sciences, their work has led to gene therapies for three devastating diseases – inherited blindness, sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia, and identified a key genetic cause of two more – ALS and frontotemporal dementia. In Physics and Mathematics, they have constructed theories of the fundamental forces of nature and probed them to mind-blowing precision, and revealed deep truths about the mathematical behavior of waves.
The Breakthrough Prizes – popularly known as the “Oscars® of Science” – were created to celebrate the wonders of our scientific age. Co-founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki, the prizes are now in their 14th year.
This year, six Breakthrough Prizes of $3 million each were awarded. In addition, the Foundation recognized 15 early-career physicists and mathematicians, who share six $100,000 New Horizons Prizes. Three women mathematicians recently completing PhDs each receives a $50,000 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize.
This year’s prize money totals $18.75 million, bringing the amount conferred over the 15 years of the Breakthrough Prize to more than $340 million.
“This year’s laureates show what great science can do — deepen our understanding of the world and lead to discoveries that improve millions of lives,” said Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Priscilla Chan, founders of Biohub. “We’re proud to recognize their work.”
“The brilliant scientists who win the Breakthrough Prize,” said Yuri Milner, co-founder of Breakthrough Prize Foundation, “Are building a cathedral of knowledge on foundations laid down by the giants who came before them. We owe our civilization – and its future – to them.”
Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
Jean Bennett, Katherine A. High and Albert Maguire share the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. This prize recognizes work that led to the first FDA–approved gene replacement therapy. It has transformed the lives of people born with Leber congenital amaurosis, a rare inherited retinal disease that usually results in total blindness in early adulthood, enabling children who had been going blind to gain their independence, attend regular schools, play outside at night, and in some cases even qualify for driver’s licenses. The therapy replaces the defective RPE65 gene, which produces a malfunctioning version of a protein critical to the visual cycle – the process by which the retina responds to light. The husband-and-wife team of molecular biologist Bennett and ophthalmic surgeon Maguire invented and developed the therapy from first conception to an effective treatment in animal models (including restoring sight to a number of Swedish Briard dogs which they went on to adopt). In 2005, High, a physician-scientist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) invited Bennett and Maguire to collaborate on a human trial. High’s laboratory and clinical gene therapy expertise proved crucial in the development of the approved drug, including gaining regulatory approval to conduct the initial clinical trials, and in directing the production and characterization of high-quality viral vector preparations used to introduce the replacement gene. The three physician-scientists worked together to design the pivotal trial, including developing and validating a novel clinical endpoint to measure the vector’s clinical effect.
Nearly all eligible Leber congenital amaurosis patients with RPE65 mutations in the United States have now been treated, and many others around the world are now gaining access to the therapy. The benefits have proved durable, with patients treated over a decade ago maintaining stable vision improvements. More broadly, this discovery demonstrated that the technology could work safely and effectively, establishing regulatory pathways and manufacturing approaches that opened the door to gene therapy approvals for a range of genetic diseases. Since their pioneering work, hundreds of trials, including over 100 retinal gene therapy trials have been conducted, with more than half a dozen currently in late-stage clinical testing.
Stuart H. Orkin and Swee Lay Thein share the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. Their research transformed the devastating blood disorders sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia from incurable to treatable conditions through gene editing therapy.
In beta-thalassemia the body fails to produce enough healthy hemoglobin; while in sickle cell disease, defective hemoglobin causes red blood cells to become stiff, sticky and sickle-shaped. But people who produce elevated levels of fetal form of hemoglobin as adults, rather than switching entirely to adult hemoglobin, have much milder forms of the diseases. This presented a tantalizing possibility for translational medicine: genetically switching fetal hemoglobin production back on, and so mitigating disease symptoms. Thein mapped the trait of persistent fetal hemoglobin production to chromosome 2, and subsequently identified the gene BCL11A as the key genetic player. Orkin demonstrated that BCL11A functions as the master repressor of fetal hemoglobin, shutting down its production after birth, and that inactivating it restored fetal hemoglobin production in mice and eliminated sickle cell disease symptoms. His laboratory identified a specific DNA enhancer region that controls BCL11A expression itself, but crucially only in red blood cells, providing a precise and safe target for therapeutic intervention without affecting other cells.
The translation of these discoveries into a CRISPR-based gene therapy (Casgevy) that edits this enhancer region in patients’ own blood stem cells resulted in the first CRISPR-based medicine approved for any disease. This work has revolutionized treatment for sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia, providing a potentially curative one-time therapy for conditions affecting millions worldwide.
Rosa Rademakers and Bryan Traynor independently solved a decades-old mystery in neurodegenerative disease by discovering the most common genetic cause of both amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and frontotemporal dementia (FTD), the second leading cause of early-onset dementia. Through multi-year, international collaborations, they collected large-scale data from families where both ALS and FTD appeared together; and through painstaking genetic analysis they zeroed in on a key genetic trigger for both diseases. In 2011, their labs simultaneously identified a mutation in the C9orf72 gene. It is an expansion mutation – a repeat of the same six-letter sequence of DNA, occurring hundreds to thousands of times in affected individuals.
The discovery represents a landmark moment in the study of these diseases. This single mutation explains about a third of familial cases of both diseases in European populations, as well as more than five percent of cases in patients with no family history of the diseases. It sheds light on the disease mechanisms, pointing in particular to multiple effects of toxic RNA and proteins in brain cells. It has established ALS and FTD – previously considered two largely separate disorders – on a disease spectrum, sharing risk factors and molecular causes. And perhaps most significantly it has enabled genetic testing for affected families, and opened new pathways for the development of treatments for these currently incurable diseases – including at least two therapies currently undergoing clinical trials. While ALS and FTD remain incurable, thanks to the C9orf72 discovery they are now conditions with plausible molecular causes and promising therapeutic targets.
Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics
Frank Merle’s work has significantly advanced the modern understanding of nonlinear evolution equations – the mathematical descriptions of how waves, fluids, and other dynamic systems change over time. His work has a particular focus on singularities: points where solutions to the equations surge to infinity. Alone and in collaborations, he has solved several fundamental problems, including proving that certain equations long thought to be well-behaved actually “blow up” – become infinite – in finite time.
Working on the soliton resolution conjecture (which predicts that any wave disturbance will eventually decompose into a set of stable, shape-preserving waves), Merle and Carlos Kenig, joined later by Thomas Duyckaerts, developed the powerful channels of energy technique coupled with the concentration compactness method. With Yvan Martel and Pierre Raphael, he revealed how singularities form in the KdV type equation (which describes various wave phenomena from shallow waves to rogue waves). Perhaps most remarkable is his work on the nonlinear version of the famous Schrödinger equation from quantum physics. In early work, he made a complete classification of all the ways this equation’s solutions can blow up. Later he proved, with Pierre Raphael, Igor Rodnianski, and Jérémie Szeftel, that the defocusing version of the equation – long believed to be inherently stable – can in fact blow up in finite time. This highly surprising result exploited an unexpected connection to fluid dynamics: it helped to resolve a major open problem, identifying smooth solutions to the compressible Euler and Navier-Stokes equations where the fluid’s density and velocity become infinite – representing a complete breakdown of the fluid description. Throughout his career, Merle’s insights have overturned fundamental assumptions in the field, forged deep connections between mathematics and physics, and opened new avenues toward some of the most celebrated unsolved problems.
Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
Across more than six decades, scientists and engineers from three “muon g-2” collaborations, representing dozens of institutions, have pushed experimental precision ever higher in pursuit of a single, very significant number: the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. The muon is a heavy, unstable cousin of the electron, and like the electron it can behave like a tiny magnet. The physicists are looking to capture how the muon’s magnetic strength is subtly affected by the “foam” of virtual particles constantly popping in and out of empty space around it. Measuring the muon’s magnetism and comparing it to theoretical predictions allows physicists to test whether any unknown particles or forces are hidden in this foam. In other words, to probe for new physics beyond the Standard Model, our most successful theory of particles and forces.
The CERN collaboration’s pioneering storage ring experiments of the 1960s and 1970s first measured the anomalous magnetic moment with meaningful precision. Then in the 1990s, Brookhaven National Laboratory’s reimagining of the experiment achieved a major improvement in precision. And after the audacious transportation of Brookhaven’s 50-ton, 15-meter-diameter storage ring 3,200 miles by road and barge to Fermilab in 2013, the experiment was systematically refined to achieve a final precision of 127 parts per billion – a mind-boggling 30,000 times more precise than the first g-2 experiment in 1965. The results had shown a tantalizing discrepancy with the value predicted by theory; and in 2023, Fermilab’s new results pushed that discrepancy close to the threshold considered evidence for new physics. Since then, the final, even more precise results, compared to newly evolved theoretical calculations narrowed the gap, but considerable uncertainty remains for the moment. Whatever the final verdict, this experiment represents a remarkable theoretical, experimental and technological endeavor, achieving extraordinary precision in the quest for fundamental understanding.
Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
David J. Gross has been a leading figure in fundamental physics for six decades. In the early 1970s, there was a gap in quantum field theory, our best theory of particles and forces. The theory could not describe or accurately predict the strong nuclear force, which holds the nucleus of the atom together. But in 1973, Gross and his graduate student Frank Wilczek (as well as, independently, David Politzer) solved the mystery. They discovered that the strong force works the opposite way to familiar forces like gravity: it gets weaker as particles approach each other, but stronger as they move apart. This explained why quarks, the particles inside the atomic nucleus, can never escape or be observed in isolation, and it enabled the development of quantum chromodynamics – the theory of the strong force and the final foundation stone of the Standard Model of particle physics.
Gross has gone on to make seminal contributions across multiple areas of theoretical physics. For example, he and his collaborators developed a simplified quantum field theory that helped explain how particles can acquire mass; and developed new theoretical approaches attempting to unify all fundamental forces, including gravity, in a single framework known as heterotic string theory.
Alongside his theoretical work, Gross has a longstanding record of leadership in the physics community, in roles including Director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, and President of the American Physical Society. He has helped establish physics institutes in India, China, and South America. He directed the Jerusalem Winter School in Theoretical Physics and chaired the Solvay Physics Conferences for the last 25 years. In 2025 he was one of the authors of an ambitious 40-year plan for physics on behalf of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. And over the course of his career, he has been a mentor to numerous brilliant students who became leaders themselves, passing on his vision of physics as a collaborative international endeavor.
Inaugural Vera Rubin New Frontiers Prize
A new physics prize, the Vera Rubin New Frontiers Prize, will be announced during the ceremony, along with the inaugural recipient, Carolina Figueiredo, from Princeton University. One $50,000 prize is awarded this year; from 2027 there will be 3 per year.
The prize is named in tribute to the great astronomer Vera Rubin, who discovered key evidence for dark matter, and in homage to whom NVIDIA’s new chip platform is named. The new prize recognizes women physicists within two years of their PhDs who have already made important contributions to science.
Carolina Figueiredo discovered that three apparently unrelated theories — two governing nuclear particles called gluons and pions, and the third describing particles in a “toy model” that does not describe the existing world — all forbid exactly the same set of particle collisions. This was a big surprise, as the three theories are quite different, with no reason to think they are connected. Figueiredo’s discovery revealed that the common behavior reflects a single underlying geometric structure: curves drawn on surfaces, within a framework now known as surfaceology. Intriguingly, this structure makes no reference to particles moving through space and time; yet it reproduces the predictions of conventional physics far more efficiently than the traditional approach, which tracks each particle’s movement through these dimensions. Figueiredo’s work thus advances – and perhaps brings closer to the real world – a broader program to reformulate the foundations of particle physics in purely geometric terms, with spacetime as an emergent phenomenon arising from a new set of principles.
New Horizons in Physics Prize
Benjamin R. Safdi has made wide-ranging contributions to the search for the axion, a hypothetical particle that would explain a long-standing puzzle about the strong nuclear force, and could account for the mysterious dark matter that makes up 85 percent of the Universe’s mass. He has proposed ingenious new strategies for detecting axion-like particles using observations of astronomical objects, from radio emissions of neutron stars to X-rays from white dwarfs.
Clay Córdova, Thomas Dumitrescu, Shu-Heng Shao, and Yifan Wang have discovered and developed the theory of “generalized symmetries” in quantum field theory. Symmetries have long been among the most powerful tools in physics. The work of these researchers has shown that the Standard Model of particle physics, as well as other quantum field theories, possess previously unrecognised symmetry structures. Their work has opened a broad new field with applications ranging from falsifying theories beyond the Standard Model to simulating fundamental particles on a lattice.
Dillon Brout, J. Colin Hill, Mathew Madhavacheril, Maria Vincenzi, Daniel Scolnic, and W. L. Kimmy Wu have gleaned powerful new results from the two most important tools for measuring the expansion and composition of the Universe: the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation left over from the Big Bang, and light from exploding stars known as Type Ia supernovae. Hill, Madhavacheril, and Wu have pushed analyses of CMB data beyond previous limits, producing the most precise tests to date of the standard cosmological model as well as of gravitational lensing of the CMB – the subtle bending of light from the early Universe by the matter it passes on its way to us. Meanwhile Brout, Scolnic, and Vincenzi built and analysed the largest modern supernova datasets – including Pantheon+, now the most cited supernova analysis in cosmology – delivering tight constraints on dark energy and the rate of expansion of the cosmos.
New Horizons in Mathematics Prize
Otis Chodosh has settled several questions in differential geometry that had been open since the 1970s and 1980s. With Chao Li, he proved a central conjecture in the field concerning a broad class of higher-dimensional spaces known as “aspherical manifolds.” With Christos Mantoulidis, he resolved a key problem in geometric analysis of minimal surfaces – surfaces that locally minimise their area, like soap films.
Vesselin Dimitrov and Yunqing Tang have solved long-standing problems in number theory that had resisted all previous approaches. With Frank Calegari, they proved the “unbounded denominators conjecture,” about a fundamental class of objects known as modular forms, using methods that surprised experts in the field. Most recently, again with Calegari, they proved the irrationality of a number related to a basic infinite series – the first result of its kind since Apéry’s celebrated work forty-five years ago.
Hong Wang has resolved or made advances on a family of notoriously difficult problems in harmonic analysis – a branch of mathematics that studies functions by decomposing them into fundamental components. With Josh Zahl, she proved the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions, one of the most famous open problems in the field: it concerns how much space is needed to rotate a needle through every possible direction.
Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize
Amanda Hirschi has produced a number of significant papers in symplectic topology, a field studying higher-dimensional surfaces with a geometric structure that generalises the mathematics of classical mechanics. With co-authors, she developed a powerful new framework that leads to major simplifications in the foundations of Gromov-Witten theory. Anna Skorobogatova has made notable contributions in geometric measure theory, which uses techniques from analysis to tackle geometric problems such as finding surfaces of minimal area. In a series of papers with collaborators, she resolved a long-standing question about the structure of singularities of area-minimising surfaces, completing a programme that spanned over sixty years. Mingjia Zhang works on higher-dimensional objects in number theory called Shimura varieties. She provided a way to better understand the geometry of Mantovan’s celebrated “product formula” in number theory.
Citations for 2026 Laureates
2026 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
Jean Bennett, University of Pennsylvania
Katherine A. High, University of Pennsylvania, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and Rockefeller University
Albert Maguire, University of Pennsylvania
For developing a therapy for inherited retinal degeneration that became the first FDA-approved gene therapy for a genetic disease.
Rosa Rademakers, VIB, University of Antwerp, and Mayo Clinic
Bryan Traynor, National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health
For the discovery of the most common genetic cause of ALS and frontotemporal dementia which charted the path for new mechanistic studies of these diseases.
Stuart H. Orkin, Boston Children’s Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Swee Lay Thein, National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health
For elucidating the mechanism driving the switch from fetal to adult hemoglobin and validating it as a therapeutic target for sickle-cell disease and beta-thalassemia.
2026 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics
Frank Merle, CY Cergy Paris Université and Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques
For breakthroughs in nonlinear evolution equations, with regards to their stability, singularity formation, or resolution into solitons.
2026 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
The Muon g-2 Collaborations at CERN, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Fermilab
For multi-decade, groundbreaking contributions to the measurement of the muon’s anomalous magnetic moment, pushing the boundaries of experimental precision and igniting a new era in the quest for physics beyond the Standard Model.
2026 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
David J. Gross, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara
For a lifetime of groundbreaking contributions to theoretical physics, from the strong force to string theory, and for tireless advocacy for basic science worldwide.
2026 Vera Rubin New Frontiers Prize
Carolina Figueiredo, Princeton University
For contributions to the geometric structure of scattering amplitudes, revealing hidden relations among quantum field theories.
2026 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize
Amanda Hirschi, IMJ-PRG, Sorbonne Université
For contributions to symplectic topology.
Anna Skorobogatova, Clay Research Fellow and ETH Zürich
For contributions to geometric measure theory.
Mingjia Zhang, Princeton University and Institute for Advanced Study
For contributions to the theory of Shimura varieties.
2026 New Horizons in Mathematics Prize
Otis Chodosh, Stanford University
For contributions to differential geometry and the calculus of variations, including work on minimal surfaces and manifolds with positive scalar curvature.
Hong Wang, Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques and New York University
For work in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, and geometric measure theory, including the local smoothing conjecture, Furstenberg set conjecture, and the Kakeya conjecture.
Vesselin Dimitrov, Caltech
Yunqing Tang, University of California, Berkeley
For work in Diophantine geometry, including the proof of the Atkin-Swinnerton-Dyer unbounded denominators conjecture and new irrationality results for special values of Dirichlet L-series (both joint with Frank Calegari).
2026 New Horizons in Physics Prize
Benjamin R. Safdi, University of California, Berkeley
For proposing new ways to seek axion-like particles with laboratory experiments and astronomical observations.
Clay Córdova, University of Chicago
Thomas Dumitrescu, Mani L. Bhaumik Institute for Theoretical Physics, UCLA
Shu-Heng Shao, MIT
Yifan Wang, New York University
For generalizing the notion of symmetry in various ways, and for exploring the consequences of these generalized symmetries, in quantum field theory, particle physics, condensed matter physics, string theory, and quantum information theory.
Dillon Brout, Boston University
J. Colin Hill, Columbia University
Mathew Madhavacheril, University of Pennsylvania
Maria Vincenzi, University of Oxford
Daniel Scolnic, Duke University
W. L. Kimmy Wu, Caltech
For advances in cosmic microwave background and supernovae cosmology.
Videos and Photos
Assets, including headshots of this year’s winners, can be downloaded for media use here.
Images and select video from the 2026 Breakthrough Prize Gala — red carpet and ceremony — can be downloaded for media use here.
The show will premiere on YouTube on Sunday, April 26th at 3PM Eastern / 12PM Pacific.
For the 14th year, the Breakthrough Prize, renowned as the “Oscars® of Science,” recognizes the world’s top scientists. Each prize is $3 million and presented in the fields of Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics and Mathematics. In addition, up to three New Horizons in Physics Prizes, up to three New Horizons in Mathematics Prizes and up to three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes are given out to early-career researchers each year. Laureates attend a gala award ceremony designed to celebrate their achievements and inspire the next generation of scientists.
The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki and have been sponsored by foundations established by them. Selection Committees composed of previous Breakthrough Prize laureates in each field choose the winners. Information on the Breakthrough Prize is available at breakthroughprize.org.
SOURCE Breakthrough Prize
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