Kavli Prize

Not to be confused with Kavli Medal.

The Kavli Prize
Awarded for	outstanding contributions in Astrophysics, Nanoscience, and Neuroscience.
Country	Norway
Presented by	Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters The Kavli Foundation Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research
Reward(s)	A gold medal, a scroll, and a monetary award of US$1,000,000
First awarded	2008
Number of laureates	21 prizes to 54 laureates (as of 2021)
Website	http://www.kavliprize.no

The Kavli Prize was established in 2005 as a joint venture of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, and the Kavli Foundation. It honors, supports, and recognizes scientists for outstanding work in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience. Three prizes are awarded every second year. Each of the three Kavli Prizes consists of a gold medal, a scroll, and a cash award of US$1,000,000. The medal has a diameter of 70 millimetres (2.8 in), a thickness of 5 millimetres (0.20 in), and weighs 311 grams (11.0 oz).

The first Kavli Prizes were awarded on 9 September 2008 in Oslo, presented by Haakon, Crown Prince of Norway.

Selection committees

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters appoints three prize committees consisting of leading international scientists after receiving recommendations made from the following organisations:

• Chinese Academy of Sciences
• French Academy of Sciences
• Max Planck Society
• United States National Academy of Sciences
• Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters
• Royal Society

Laureates

Astrophysics

Year	Laureate		Institution	Country	Citation
2008		Maarten Schmidt	California Institute of Technology		"for their seminal contributions to understanding the nature of quasars"
		Donald Lynden-Bell	Cambridge University
2010		Jerry E. Nelson	Lick Observatory, University of California, Santa Cruz		"for their contributions to the development of giant telescopes"
		Raymond N. Wilson	European Southern Observatory, Garching
		James Roger Angel	Steward Observatory, University of Arizona
2012		David C. Jewitt	University of California Los Angeles		"for discovering and characterizing the Kuiper Belt and its largest members, work that led to a major advance in the understanding of the history of our planetary system"
		Jane X. Luu	Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
		Michael E. Brown	California Institute of Technology
2014		Alan H. Guth	Massachusetts Institute of Technology		"for pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation"
		Andrei D. Linde	Stanford University
		Alexei A. Starobinsky	Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics
2016		Ronald W.P. Drever	California Institute of Technology		"for the direct detection of gravitational waves"
		Kip S. Thorne	California Institute of Technology
		Rainer Weiss	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2018		Ewine van Dishoeck	Leiden University		"for her combined contributions to observational, theoretical, and laboratory astrochemistry, elucidating the life cycle of interstellar clouds and the formation of stars and planets"
2020		Andrew Fabian	University of Cambridge		"for his groundbreaking research in the field of observational X-ray astronomy, covering a wide range of topics from gas flows in clusters of galaxies to supermassive black holes at the heart of galaxies"
2022		Roger Ulrich	University of California, Los Angeles		"for their pioneering work and leadership in the development of helio- and asteroseismology"
		Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard	Aarhus University
		Conny Aerts	KU Leuven
2024		Sara Seager	Massachusetts Institute of Technology		"for their ground-breaking work on the discovery and characterization of extra-solar planets and their atmospheres"
		David Charbonneau	Harvard University

Nanoscience

Year	Laureate		Institution	Country	Citation
2008		Louis E. Brus	Columbia University		"for their large impact in the development of the nanoscience field of the zero and one dimensional nanostructures in physics, chemistry and biology"
		Sumio Iijima	Meijo University
2010		Donald Eigler	IBM Almaden Research Center		"for their development of unprecedented methods to control matter on the nanoscale"
		Nadrian C. Seeman	New York University
2012		Mildred S. Dresselhaus	Massachusetts Institute of Technology		"for her pioneering contributions to the study of phonons, electron-phonon interactions, and thermal transport in nanostructures"
2014		Thomas W. Ebbesen	University of Strasbourg		"for transformative contributions to the field of nano-optics that have broken long-held beliefs about the limitations of the resolution limits of optical microscopy and imaging"
		Stefan W. Hell	Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry
		John B. Pendry	Imperial College London
2016		Gerd Binnig	IBM Zurich Research Laboratory		"for the invention and realization of atomic force microscopy, a breakthrough in measurement technology and nanosculpting that continues to have a transformative impact on nanoscience and technology"
		Christoph Gerber	University of Basel
		Calvin Quate	Stanford University
2018		Emmanuelle Charpentier	Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology		"for the invention of CRISPR-Cas9, a precise nanotool for editing DNA, causing a revolution in biology, agriculture, and medicine"
		Jennifer Doudna	University of California, Berkeley
		Virginijus Šikšnys	Vilnius University
2020		Harald Rose	Universität Ulm		"for sub-ångström resolution imaging and chemical analysis using electron beams"
		Maximilian Haider	CEOS GmbH
		Knut Urban	Forschungszentrum Jülich
		Ondrej Krivanek	Nion Co
2022		Jacob Sagiv	Weizmann Institute of Science		"for Self-Assembled Monolayers (SAMs) on solid substrates; molecular coatings to control surface properties"
		Ralph Nuzzo	University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
		David Allara	Pennsylvania State University
		George M. Whitesides	Harvard University
2024		Robert S. Langer	Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology		"for pioneering work integrating synthetic nanoscale materials with biological function for biomedical applications"
		Armand Paul Alivisatos	University of Chicago
		Chad A. Mirkin	Northwestern University

Neuroscience

Year	Laureate		Institution	Country	Citation
2008		Sten Grillner	Karolinska Institute		"for discoveries on the developmental and functional logic of neuronal circuits"
		Thomas Jessell	Columbia University
		Pasko Rakic	Yale University School of Medicine
2010		Richard H. Scheller	Genentech		"for discovering the molecular basis of neurotransmitter release"
		Thomas C. Südhof	Stanford University School of Medicine
		James E. Rothman	Yale University
2012		Cornelia Isabella Bargmann	Rockefeller University		"for elucidating basic neuronal mechanisms underlying perception and decision"
		Winfried Denk	Max Planck Institute for Medical Research
		Ann M. Graybiel	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2014		Brenda Milner	Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University		"for the discovery of specialized brain networks for memory and cognition"
		John O’Keefe	University College London
		Marcus E. Raichle	Washington University in St. Louis
2016		Eve Marder	Brandeis University		"for the discovery of mechanisms that allow experience and neural activity to remodel brain function"
		Michael M. Merzenich	University of California, San Francisco
		Carla J. Shatz	Stanford University
2018		A. James Hudspeth	Rockefeller University		"for their scientific discoveries of the molecular and neural mechanisms of hearing"
		Robert Fettiplace	University of Wisconsin–Madison
		Christine Petit	Collège de France
2020		David Julius	University of California, San Francisco		"for their transformative discovery of receptors for temperature and pressure".
		Ardem Patapoutian	Scripps Research and Howard Hughes Medical Investigator
2022		Jean-Louis Mandel	University of Strasbourg		"for pioneering the discovery of genes underlying a range of brain disorders"
		Harry T. Orr	University of Minnesota Medical School
		Huda Zoghbi	Baylor College of Medicine
		Christopher A. Walsh	Harvard Medical School
2024		Nancy Kanwisher	Massachusetts Institute of Technology		"for the discovery of a highly localized and specialized system for representation of faces in human and non-human primate neocortex"
		Winrich Freiwald	Rockefeller University
		Doris Ying Tsao	University of California, Berkeley

See also

• List of general science and technology awards
• List of astronomy awards
• List of neuroscience awards
• The Brain Prize
• Golden Brain Award
• Gruber Prize in Neuroscience
• W. Alden Spencer Award
• Karl Spencer Lashley Award
• Mind & Brain Prize
• Ralph W. Gerard Prize in Neuroscience

External links

• The Kavli Prize, official site
• The Kavli Prize on The Kavli Foundation site Archived 20 January 2021 at the Wayback Machine
• The Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research