The Hong Kong-based Shaw Prize Foundation has announced the recipients of the 2016 Shaw Prizes in astronomy, life science and medicine, and mathematical sciences.

First awarded in 2004, the Shaw Prizes honor individuals who have achieved a significant breakthrough in academic and scientific research or application and whose work has had a profound and positive impact on mankind. Each prize comes with a cash award of $1.2 million, up from the $1 million awarded in previous years.

This year's astronomy prize will be shared by Ronald W.P. Drever and Kip S. Thorne of the California Institute of Technology and Rainer Weiss at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for their conception and design of the laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory (LIGO), whose recent detection of gravitational waves in deep space opened a new window in astronomy, including the remarkable discovery of the merger of a pair of stellar-mass black holes.

The Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine will be shared by Adrian Bird of the University of Edinburgh and Huda Y. Zoghbi of Baylor College of Medicine and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for their discovery of the genes and encoded proteins that recognize a chemical modification of the DNA of chromosomes that influences gene control as the basis of Rett syndrome. And the Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences was awarded to Nigel J. Hitchin of Oxford University for his far-reaching contributions to geometry, representation theory, and theoretical physics.