The 2025 Breakthrough Prize ceremony was held in Santa Monica, California, on April 05, 2025. The prizes are renowned as the ‘Oscars of Science’. The star-studded event was attended by Hollywood celebrities, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Jodie Foster, and Zoe Saldana besides tech royalties like Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Open AI CEO Sam Altman.
In its 13th year, the 2025 Breakthrough Prize honoured leading scientists from around the globe. Each award carried US$ three million and was presented in the categories of Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics, and Mathematics. Additionally, up to three New Horizons Prizes of US$ one million each in both physics and mathematics, along with up to three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes, of US$ 50,000 each, are awarded annually to early-career researchers.
The total prize amount for the year 2025 was US$ 18.75 million, bringing the cumulative amount for awards over 13 years to more than US$ 326 million.
Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences In this category, the award was given to three groups of scientists for:
Weight Loss Drugs: Five scientists were honoured for their pivotal role in developing the weight loss medications like Ozempic and Wegovy. Daniel J. Drucker, Joel Habener, Jens Juul Holst, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, and Svetlana Mojsov received the award for their discovery and characterisation of GLP-1 hormone, which was instrumental in creating treatments for diabetes and obesity.
Multiple Sclerosis Treatment: Alberto Ascherio and Stephen L. Hauser were honoured for their groundbreaking work on multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic and unpredictable disease in which the immune system attacks the protective covering of nerve fibres in the central nervous system. They identified the critical role of B-cells in the development of MS and developed targeted treatments. Additionally, they established a strong link between Epstein-Barr virus infection and the onset of MS, highlighting it as a primary cause of the disease.
Gene-Editing Technologies: David R. Liu was awarded the prize for the development of base editing and prime editing technologies, which have revolutionised the way scientists edit DNA in living organisms. These innovative methods allow precise genetic modifications without cutting the DNA’s double helix, enabling the correction of entire stretches of faulty DNA with greater accuracy and safety.
Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
In Fundamental Physics, the prize was awarded to thousands of scientists from over 70 countries who are part of four major experimental collaborations at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC): ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb. (ATLAS: A Toroidal LHC Apparatus, CMS: Compact Muon Solenoid, ALICE: A Large Ion Collider Experiment, LHCb: Large Hadron Collider Beauty)
These collaborations conduct experiments at the LHC to study fundamental aspects of particle physics.
LHC, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, enables scientists to study the fundamental nature of matter by accelerating and colliding protons. Four major collaborations used data from LHC Run-2 to investigate the Higgs boson, a particle that imparts mass to others and key to understanding the origins of the universe. These teams further discovered new particles, explored the strong nuclear force, and tested fundamental physics theories. In recognition of their work, Breakthrough Prize was awarded to their precise measurements, confirming how mass is generated, discoveries of new strongly interacting particles and insights into nature at its most extreme scales.
The US$ three million prize was distributed among the four CERN LHC collaborations: US$ one million each to ATLAS and CMS, and US$ 500,000 each to ALICE and LHCb. This award recognises 13,508 co-authors of publications based on LHC Run-2 data released between 2015 and 2024, including 5,345 researchers from ATLAS; 4,550 from CMS; 1,869 from ALICE; and 1,744 from LHCb.
In consultation with the leaders of the experiments, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation donated the entire US$ three million prize to the CERN & Society Foundation. The funds will support grants for doctoral students from member institutes, enabling them to conduct research at CERN. This initiative aims to give students hands-on experience at the cutting edge of science and equip them with advanced skills to contribute to scientific development in their home countries and regions.
Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics
Dennis Gaitsgory was awarded this prize in Mathematics for his pivotal contribution to proving the geometric Langlands conjecture. The Langlands program is a far-reaching research initiative that seeks deep connections across various branches of mathematics. Gaitsgory spent over 30 years advancing this work, developing innovative tools in derived algebraic geometry to address one of the program’s central conjectures, marking a major milestone in the field.
Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
Gerard ’t Hooft, recipient of the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, is a leading theoretical physicist whose work in the 1970s helped lay the foundation for the Standard Model of the subatomic particles. He demonstrated that Yang-Mills theories—which underpin the weak and strong nuclear forces—could yield finite, meaningful results in quantum mechanics. His contributions also include resolving particle mass issues using special field configurations known as instantons, developing tools to study quark interactions, and advancing the understanding of the strong force.
Additionally, his research how information is processed in black holes influenced the development of the holographic principle in cosmology and potential new interpretations of quantum mechanics.
New Horizons in Physics Prize
The 2025 New Horizons in Physics Prizes recognised early-career researchers for groundbreaking work across diverse fields. The recipients are:
- Waseem Bakr for advanced atomic physics with quantum gas microscopes that image individual atoms in optical lattices.
- Jeongwan Haah for developing models of emergent quantum systems, including Haah’s code contributing to quantum computing through the study of fractions.
- Sebastiaan Haffert, Rebecca Jensen-Clem and Maaike van Kooten for creating new techniques in extreme adaptive optics in astronomy, enhancing the ability to directly detect the smallest exoplanets.
New Horizons in Mathematics Prize
The 2025 New Horizons Mathematics Prizes were awarded to researchers whose work bridges mathematics and quantum physics:
- Ewain Gwynne was honoured for his contributions to conformal probability, involving random curves and surfaces.
- John Pardon made significant advances in geometry and topology, especially in simplectic geometry and pseudo-holomorphic curves.
- Sam Raskin played a key role in recent breakthroughs on the geometric Langlands program, including the final proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture in characteristic ‘0’.
Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize
The Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes were awarded to:
- Si Ying Lee, who developed a novel approach to a key problem in the Langlands program by reducing it into a local problem.
- Rajula Srivastava for advancing research at the intersection of harmonic analysis and number theory, particularly in bounding lattice points near smooth surfaces, with applications in Diophantine approximation in higher dimensions.
- Ewin Tang, who created quantum computing algorithms for machine learning and demonstrated that certain problems could be solved in comparable time by classical or non-quantum computers.
India’s Bose Institute, Kolkata, Wins Breakthrough Prize
In a significant milestone for Indian science, a team of physicists from Kolkata’s Bose Institute has been honoured with the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. This accolade is part of the global recognition given to the ALICE collaboration at CERN’S LHC, which investigates Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP)—a state of matter believed to have existed shortly after the Big Bang.
The Experimental High Energy Physics (HEP) group at Bose Institute, including Supriya Das, Sidharth Kumar Prasad, Saikat Biswas, Sanchari Thakur, and Senior Research Fellow Mintu Halder, played a vital role in this global experiment.
Notably, Bose Institute is the only autonomous institution under India’s Department of Science and Technology involved in ALICE, having joined under the leadership of former director, Professor Sibaji Raha.
The HEP group made wide-ranging contributions, including hardware development, simulation, data analysis, and operations. A major achievement was the creation and deployment of the indigenous Photon Multiplicity Detector (PMD), which functioned at CERN from 2008 to 2018. Bose Institute led PMD operations from 2014 and oversaw post-run data cleanup and calibration, working closely with Indian researchers.
Additionally, the team played a key role in upgrading the Time Projection Chamber (TPC), a central ALICE detector. They contributed to the development of advanced readout chambers using Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) technology, enhancing performance in high-luminosity conditions.
In physics analysis, the scientists led six major publications and contributed to several more, solidifying India’s role in global high-energy physics research.
About Breakthrough Prize
The Breakthrough Prizes were established in the year 2013 by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan, and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki, with funding provided by the foundations established by them. Winners are selected by committees made up of past Breakthrough Prize recipients in each respective field.
As a part of its mission, the Breakthrough Prize honours individual accomplishments and recognises scientists as society’s heroes. It seeks to inspire future generations of researchers while promoting ‘science for the benefit of all’ as a global and apolitical organisation.
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