Archive by category | Awards and prizes

NIH awards $46 million for brain-research tools

Just 18 months after the White House announced the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, the US National Institutes of Health has awarded its first US$46 million in grants for the programme.  Read more

Prime numbers, black carbon and nanomaterials win 2014 MacArthur ‘genius grants’

Yitang Zhang, a mathematician who recently emerged from obscurity when he partly solved a long-standing puzzle in number theory, is one of the 2014 fellows of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.  Read more

Balzan prizes honour plant ecologist and mathematician

Plant ecologist G. David Tilman from the University of Minnesota in Saint Paul and mathematician Dennis Sullivan from the City University of New York are among the four winners of this year’s prestigious Balzan Prize. The announcement was made on 8 September.  Read more

Lasker Award goes to breast-cancer researcher

The 2014 Albert Lasker Special Achievement Award has been awarded to the geneticist Mary-Claire King. King, of the University of Washington in Seattle, is the leader of the team that discovered the BRCA genes, mutations of which are linked to breast cancer. King’s team found that the 10% of women affected by such mutations have nearly an 80% chance of developing breast cancer. The rush to develop tests for the mutations triggered a legal dispute in the United States that ended with a US Supreme Court ruling prohibiting the patenting of naturally-occurring genes.  Read more

Antibiotic resistance focus of UK Longitude Prize

The people have spoken. Antibiotic resistance has been voted by the British public as the subject of the UK government’s £10 million ($17 million) Longitude Prize – an initiative aimed at tackling society’s greatest issues.  Read more

Kavli Prizes reward cosmic inflation, memory research and imaging

Kavli Prizes reward cosmic inflation, memory research and imaging

The 2014 Kavli Prizes, announced today, were shared among nine scientists for their work on the theory of cosmic inflation, for contributions to the field of nano-optics and for the discovery of specialized brain networks for memory and cognition.  Read more