The Breakthrough Prize Foundation has announced the winners of the 2022 Breakthrough Prizes in life sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics.

In its tenth year, the foundation awarded a total of $15.75 million to laureates and early-career scientists in support of groundbreaking discoveries. Each of the five main Breakthrough Prizes includes a $3 million award. Recipients in the life sciences category include Jeffery W. Kelly (Scripps Research Institute) for his work to elucidate the molecular basis of neurodegenerative and cardiac transthyretin diseases and for developing tafamidis, a drug that slows their progression; Katalin Karikó (BioNTech and University of Pennsylvania) and Drew Weissman (University of Pennsylvania) for their work to engineer modified RNA technology, which enabled the rapid development of effective COVID-19 vaccines; and Shankar Balasubramanian (University of Cambridge), David Klenerman (University of Cambridge), and Pascal Mayer (Alphanosos) for the development of a robust and affordable method to determine DNA sequences on a massive scale, which has transformed the practice of science and medicine.

In the fundamental physics category, the prize was awarded to Hidetoshi Katori (University of Tokyo and RIKEN) and Jun Ye (National Institute of Standards and Technology and University of Colorado) for their contributions to the invention and development of the optical lattice clock, which enables precision tests of the fundamental laws of nature. And in the mathematics category, the prize was awarded to Takuro Mochizuki (Kyoto University) for work leading to a breakthrough in our understanding of the theory of bundles with flat connections over algebraic varieties, including the case of irregular singularities.

In addition, the foundation awarded six New Horizons Prizes of $100,000 each to be distributed between thirteen early-career scientists and mathematicians who have already made a substantial impact on their fields, and three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes to early-career women mathematicians.

The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Anne Wojcicki, and Yuri and Julia Milner, and have been sponsored by the personal foundations established by the founders as well as Ma Huateng and Jack Ma.