2025 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony Puts Science in the Spotlight

This year’s Breakthrough Prize—popularly known as the “Oscars of Science”—brought the world’s leading scientists together with Hollywood’s top stars to celebrate their incredible achievements and inspire the next generation of scientists in a night that coalesced science, pop culture, and tech.

Founded in 2012, the Breakthrough Prize was created by tech giants Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, Julia & Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki to celebrate the wonders of our advanced scientific age. To date, the Breakthrough Prize remains the world’s largest science award—the prize awards six prizes of $3 million, roughly three times the amount of the Nobel Prize purse size—and strives to elevate the stature of research in pop culture with a celebrity guest list not dissimilar from the Academy Awards.

With its awards, the Breakthrough Prize recognizes achievements in the Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics, and Mathematics. It also granted eight early-career physicists and mathematicians six $100,000 New Horizons Prizes and three women mathematicians a $50,000 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize. This year alone, the organization awarded $18.75 million in prize funds—bringing the total amount granted over the last 14 years of the Breakthrough Prize to more than $326 million.

Hosted by actor and comedian James Corden, this year’s ceremony featured celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow, Alicia Keys, Leonardo DiCaprio, Drew Barrymore, and Mr. Beast—as well as tech entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The 2025 awards specifically honored individuals pioneering discoveries in gene editing, human diseases, and the fundamental particles of the universe and its underlying mathematical principles.

In the Life Sciences, Daniel J. Drucker, Joel Habener, Jens Juul Holst, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen and Svetlana Mojsov share a prize for discoveries that have led to highly effective drugs for diabetes and obesity—welcoming a new era of GLP-1 medicines for cardiometabolic disorders that’s transforming the treatment of metabolic diseases affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Stephen L. Hauser and Alberto Ascherio have transformed the understanding and treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS), a debilitating neurodegenerative disease in which the immune system attacks the insulating protein around nerve fibers. Hauser overturned previous understanding around the disease’s mechanism and revolutionized modern treatment of MS with B-cell depleting therapies while Ascherio identified that infection by the Epstein-Barr virus is the leading risk for multiple sclerosis.

The last Life Science laureate, David R Liu developed two powerful, widely used gene-editing technologies which are able to correct mutations in our DNA (without cutting the DNA double helix) that cause genetic diseases in patients. His technologies have already been distributed in labs globally, resulting in thousands of advances in research, biomedicine, and agriculture, and have already shown life-saving results in treatment of T-cell leukemia, sickle cell disease, beta-thalassemia, and high cholesterol.

“This year’s Breakthrough Prize laureates have made amazing strides — including treatments for major diseases affecting millions of people worldwide — showing once again the transformative power of curiosity-driven basic science,” said Chan and Zuckerberg, Prize Co-Founder and Co-CEOs of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. 

This year’s Fundamental Physics award was shared by thousands of researchers across 70 countries representing four experimental collaborations at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider: The ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb. Recognized for testing the modern theory of particle physics, the four experiments set strong bounds on possibilities for new physics regarding dark matter, supersymmetry and hidden extra dimensions; precisely measuring properties of the Higgs boson and elucidating the mechanism by which the Higgs field gives mass to elementary particles; and exploring differences between matter and antimatter to push the boundaries of fundamental physics unlike ever before. In addition, the Special Breakthrough Prize was awarded to Gerard ‘t Hooft, one of the world’s pre-eminent theoretical physicists.

Dennis Gaitsgory was this year’s sole Mathematics Breakthrough Prize winner for his role in the proof of the Langlands Program, a powerful series of conjectures proposing precise connections between seemingly disparate mathematical concepts. Considered generalizations of the Fourier transform, a tool that relates waves to frequency, the geometric Langlands conjecture proposes correspondence between two very different sets of objects — a monumental advancement in the field that Gaitsgory has spent much of the last 30 years working towards.