Breakthrough Prizes Awarded to 4 Simons Investigators

On November 8, four Simons Foundation investigators — Ian Agol, Karl Deisseroth, Svante Pääbo and Larry Guth — were awarded 2016 Breakthrough Prizes.

The prize, which was established by Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Jack Ma and Cathy Zhang, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, recognizes outstanding work in the life sciences, fundamental physics and mathematics. The winners were announced during a ceremony in Silicon Valley that was aired live on the National Geographic Channel.

Ian Agol of the University of California, Berkeley, who is currently on sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study, won the mathematics prize. Karl Deisseroth, of Stanford University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Svante Pääbo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, won prizes in the life sciences. The laureates were awarded $3 million each. Larry Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won a New Horizons in Mathematics Prize, which carries with it an award of $100,000.

More information on the Breakthrough Prizes is available here.