From the Oscars to the Golden Globes, Hollywood has no shortage of starry awards shows — but there’s only one at which pop princesses like Lizzo and Katy Perry rub elbows with Nobel Prize laureates, while Paris Hilton takes selfies with scientists developing gene-editing techniques that can cure cancer.
The Breakthrough Prize Ceremony, also known as the “Oscars of Science,” was founded by Silicon Valley titans Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki. Now in its 13th year, the show honors scientists, doctors and researchers who have made significant breakthroughs in their respective fields, and sends winners home with $3 million checks.
This year’s ceremony took place at Santa Monica’s Barker Hanger on Saturday, and celebrity attendees — including Leonardo DiCaprio, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jodie Foster, Alicia Keys, Drew Barrymore, Christina Aguilera, Mr. Beast, Gayle King, Jeremy Strong, Jessica Chastain, Kate Hudson, Olivia Wilde, Rob Lowe, Glenn Close and Zoe Saldaña — were joined by tech leaders such as Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Brin, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, as well as businessman Rupert Murdoch.
James Corden once again emceed the evening and opened the show by acknowledging the recent stock market crash.
“A lot of you have had a bad week. You know what I can see from up here? I see a room full of people who are starting to worry that they might have to fly commercial again,” he joked, while also referencing how President Trump’s recent tariffs could affect foreign scientists.
“Not only will we be celebrating them, we’ll actually be helping fund their vital and groundbreaking research, because every winner will go home tonight with $3 million,” Corden said. “Although I should warn you, unfortunately, due to some recent tariffs, international winners will actually only now be going home with $45,000.”
Following Corden’s opening remarks, six Breakthrough Prizes were awarded in categories covering life sciences, fundamental physics and mathematics; in addition, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation announced that eight early-career physicists and mathematicians were sharing six $100,000 New Horizons Prizes. Among the winners were David Liu, who developed new gene-editing tools that were used to save the life of a young girl suffering from Leukemia by correcting disease-causing mutations in her DNA, and Dr. Stephen Hauser, who was honored for developing advanced treatments for people with multiple sclerosis.
Although the show honored scientists, it still featured Hollywood glamour, and every winner was introduced by a blockbuster-style movie trailer that showcased them and their work. Some celebrities — those serving as the evening’s presenters — shared how scientific breakthroughs impacted their lives. While posthumously honoring George Berci, an innovator in using miniature cameras to perform minimally invasive surgeries, Gal Gadot shared how his work helped prevent a major medical crisis while she was pregnant.
“A little over a year ago, I had a big health scare when I was eight months pregnant. I had debilitating headaches and I had no idea what was happening inside my head,” she told the crowd. “I’m here today thanks to the amazing Cedars-Sinai Medical Center here in Los Angeles. Using MRI — a technology made possible, as we heard earlier, by particle physics — the doctors there discovered I had a blood clot. In fact, I had three major blood clots. I’m kind of an all-or-nothing type of person, but I’m here today thanks to them and the technology that they use.”
Halfway through the show, Perry took the stage accompanied by a pianist and a cello to perform soulful renditions of “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Firework.” Additional entertainment was provided by Brin — showing off his magic tricks — and professional magician David Blaine, who performed an elaborate trick in which every guest shuffled a pack of cards according to Blaine’s instructions and then had hundreds of people select the exact same card.
While presenting an award with Edward Norton, Seth Rogen gave an unfiltered take on the night amid current events. After Norton praised those in the room who underwrote the show with millions of dollars, Rogen added, “And it’s amazing that others in this room underwrote electing a man who, in the last week, single-handedly destroyed all of American science.”
Rogen, clearly referencing Elon Musk, a guest at last year‘s Breakthrough Prize ceremony, and his role in cutting federal resources, continued, “It’s amazing how much good science you can destroy with $320 million and RFK Jr., very fast.”
A full list of winners follows.
Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
Daniel J. Drucker, Joel Habener, Jens Juul Holst, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen and Svetlana Mojsov, for the discovery and characterization of GLP-1 and revealing its physiology and potential in treating diabetes and obesity.
Alberto Ascherio and Stephen L. Hauser, for establishing the role of B cells in multiple sclerosis and developing B-cell based treatments, and for revealing that Epstein-Barr virus infection is the leading risk for multiple sclerosis.
David R. Liu, for developing base editing and prime editing, technologies that edit the DNA of living systems without cutting the DNA double helix, and rewrite segments of genes at their native locations, enabling the correction or replacement of virtually any mutation.
Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
The ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb Collaborations at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, for detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties confirming the symmetry-breaking mechanism of mass generation, the discovery of new strongly interacting particles, the study of rare processes and matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the exploration of nature at the shortest distances and most extreme conditions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
Gerardus ‘t Hooft, for fundamental insights into gauge theory and the standard model.
Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics
Dennis Gaitsgory, for foundational works and numerous breakthrough contributions to the geometric Langlands program and its quantum version; in particular, the development of the derived algebraic geometry approach and the proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture in characteristic 0.
New Horizons in Mathematics Prize
Ewain Gwynne, for contributions to conformal probability, in particular to the understanding of the LQG metric.
John Pardon, for contributions to symplectic topology and other areas of geometry and topology.
Sam Raskin, for contributions to the geometric Langlands program, including the theory of the Whittaker model and the proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture in characteristic 0.
Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize
Si Ying Lee, for contributions to the theory of Shimura varieties.
Rajula Srivastava, for contributions in harmonic analysis and analytic number theory, including contributions to the problem of counting rational points near smooth manifolds.
Ewin Tang, for developing classical analogs of quantum algorithms for machine learning and linear algebra, and for advances in quantum machine learning on quantum data.
New Horizons in Physics Prize
Waseem Bakr, for the realization of quantum gas microscopes for atoms and molecules, providing a microscopic view on correlations and transport in strongly interacting quantum systems.
Jeongwan Haah, for the discovery of Haah’s code, in which fractal conservation laws emerge, and other models bringing discrete mathematical structures to physics.
Sebastiaan Haffert, Rebecca Jensen-Clem and Maaike van Kooten, for demonstrating new extreme adaptive optics techniques that will allow the direct detection of the smallest exoplanets.
