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Read bio Anne L'Huillier

 

Anne L'Huillier, born 1958, is a French-Swedish physicist, and professor of atomic physics at Lund University in Sweden.

L'Huillier studied physics and mathematics at the University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. Her PhD was in experimental physics at the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives in Saclay Nuclear Research Centre. As a post-doctoral fellow, she was in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Los Angeles, California, United States. From 1986 to 1995, she was employed at the Saclay Nuclear Research Centre. In 1995 she moved to Lund University, Sweden, becoming professor in 1997. L'Huillier has been a member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences since 2004.

Read bio Ferenc Krausz

 

Ferenc Krausz, born 17 May 1962, is a Hungarian-Austrian physicist, whose research team has generated and measured the first attosecond light pulse and used it for capturing electrons’ motion inside atoms, marking the birth of attophysics.

Krausz studied theoretical physics at Eötvös Loránd University and electrical engineering at the Technical University of Budapest in Hungary. After his habilitation at the Technical University of Vienna, in Austria, he became professor at the same institute. In 2003 he was appointed director at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and in 2004 became chair of experimental physics at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. In 2006 he co-founded the Munich-Centre of Advanced Photonics (MAP) and began serving as one of its directors. In 2018, he initiated the Center for Molecular Fingerprinting in Budapest, Hungary, for pursuing the validation of a novel at to second-metrology-based platform for health monitoring.

He won the Wolf Prize in Physics for his ground-breaking discoveries in disordered systems, particle physics, and statistical physics.

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Read bio Giorgio Parisi

Giorgio Parisi, born 4 August 1948, is an Italian theoretical physicist, whose research has focused on quantum field theory, statistical mechanics and complex systems.

Parisi received his degree from the University of Rome La Sapienza in 1970 under the supervision of Nicola Cabibbo. He was a researcher at the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati (1971–1981) and a visiting scientist at the Columbia University (1973–1974), Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (1976–1977), and École Normale Supérieure (1977–1978). From 1981 until 1992 he was a full professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and he is now professor of Quantum Theories at the Sapienza University of Rome. He is a member of the Simons Collaboration "Cracking the Glass Problem". From 2018 until 2021 he was the president of the Accademia dei Lincei.

She won the Wolf Prize in Agriculture for pioneering discoveries in flowering time control and epigenetic basis of vernalization.

Read bio Caroline Dean

Caroline Dean, born 2 April 1957, is a British plant scientist working at the John Innes Centre. She is focused on understanding the molecular controls used by plants to seasonally judge when to flower. She is specifically interested in vernalisation — the acceleration of flowering in plants by exposure to periods of prolonged cold. This has taken her into conserved mechanisms of co-transcriptional gene regulation and epigenetic switches.

Dean was educated at the University of York, where she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology in 1978 and a PhD. in Biology in 1982. She was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (1999), Fellow of the Royal Society (2004), German Leopoldina Academy (2008), Foreign Member US National Academy of Sciences (2008), Dame Commander of the British Empire (2016).

In 2015 she was awarded the FEBS/EMBO Women in Science Award, in 2018 the L’Oreal/UNESCO Women in Science European Laureate, and in 2020 she won the Wolf Prize in Agriculture “for pioneering discoveries in flowering time control and epigenetic basis of vernalization.” She has also been on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2018.

He won the Wolf Prize in Mathematics for contributions to differential geometry and topology.

Read bio Simon Kirwan Donaldson

Simon Kirwan Donaldson, born 20 August 1957, is an English mathematician known for his work on the topology of smooth (differentiable) four-dimensional manifolds, Donaldson–Thomas theory, and his contributions to Kähler geometry.

After gaining his DPhil degree from Oxford University in 1983, Donaldson was appointed a Junior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He spent the academic year 1983–84 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and returned to Oxford as Wallis Professor of Mathematics in 1985. After spending one year visiting Stanford University, he moved to Imperial College London in 1998 as Professor of Pure Mathematics. In 2014, he joined the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University in New York, United States. From 2014 to 2023, he was a permanent member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University in New York. He is currently a Professor in Pure Mathematics at Imperial College, London.

Read bio Jean-François Le Gall

Jean-François Le Gall, born 15 November 1959, is a French mathematician working in areas of probability theory such as Brownian motion, Lévy processes, superprocesses and their connections with partial differential equations, the Brownian snake, random trees, branching processes, stochastic coalescence and random planar maps.

He received his Ph.D. in 1982 from Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris VI) under the supervision of Marc Yor. He is currently professor at the University of Paris-Saclay in Orsay and has been a senior member of the Institut universitaire de France. He was elected to French academy of sciences, December 2013. 

He won the Wolf Prize in Agriculture for providing groundbreaking contributions to plant and animal sciences, respectively, by using modern technologies of genomic research.

Read bio Leif Andersson

Leif Andersson, born 1954, is a Swedish animal geneticist and professor of functional genomics at Uppsala University. Andersson was inducted into the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2002 and is a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2017.

After completing his undergraduate degree, Andersson completed his PhD at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. He moved to Uppsala University in 2003. Andersson has pioneered the use of domestic animals as a resource to advance knowledge on genotype-phenotype relationships using genomics. Andersson has explored the domestication of pigs, chicken, rabbits and horses. He has also researched the evolution of Darwin’s finches and their beaks and the genetics of ecological adaptation in Atlantic herring (initially funded by the ERC).

He won the Wolf Prize in Physics for groundbreaking theoretical contributions to quantum information processing, quantum optics and the physics of quantum gases.

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Read bio Peter Zoller

Peter Zoller, born 16 September 1952, is a theoretical physicist from Austria, best known for his pioneering research on quantum computing and quantum communication and for bridging quantum optics and solid state physics. Peter Zoller studied physics at the University of Innsbruck, obtained his doctorate there in February 1977, and became a lecturer at their Institute of Theoretical Physics. For 1978/79, he was granted a Max Kade stipend to research with Peter Lambropoulos at the University of Southern California. In 1991, Peter Zoller was appointed Professor of Physics and JILA Fellow at JILA and at the Physics Department of the University of Colorado, Boulder. At the end of 1994, he accepted a chair at the University of Innsbruck, where he has worked ever since. From 1995 to 1999, he headed the Institute of Theoretical Physics, from 2001 to 2004, he was vice-dean of studies. In 2012/13 he was "Distinguished Fellow" at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Munich. In 2014 he has been elected as an "External Scientific Member" at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics. In 2015 he held the International Jacques Solvay Chair in Physics at the University of Brussels. Since 2003, Peter Zoller has also held the position of Scientific Director at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 2018, Peter Zoller co-founded Alpine Quantum Technologies, a quantum computing hardware company.

He won the Wolf Prize in Agriculture for the pioneering discovery of gene regulation by small inhibitory RNA molecules in plants is of profound importance, not only for agriculture, but also for biology as a whole, including the field of medicine.

Read bio David Charles Baulcombe

 

David Charles Baulcombe, born 1952, is a British plant scientist and geneticist. Baulcombe did his studies at the University of Edinburgh, where he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1977 for research on Messenger RNA in vascular plants supervised by John Ingle. After his PhD, Baulcombe was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) and the University of Georgia (Athens, Georgia, United States). In December 1980 Baulcombe started his career as an independent scientist at the Plant Breeding Institute (PBI) in Cambridge UK. He joined the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich from 1988 as a senior research scientist and was also Professor at the University of East Anglia since 2002. Since 2007 he has been the Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge (Emeritus since 2019).

In 2010 Baulcombe won the Wolf Prize in Agriculture: “Sir David Baulcombe’s pioneering discovery of gene regulation by small inhibitory RNA molecules in plants is of profound importance, not only for agriculture, but also for biology as a whole, including the field of medicine”.

He has also received the Gruber Genetics Prize (2014), the Balzan Prize (2012) (for epigenetics) (Balzan Foundation, Rome) and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (2008) Lasker Foundation (shared with Ambros and Ruvkun)

He won the Wolf Prize in Physics for the fundamental conceptual and experimental contributions to the foundations of quantum physics, specifically an increasingly sophisticated series of tests of Bell’s inequalities or extensions there of using entangled quantum states.

Read bio Anton Zeilinger

Anton Zeilinger, born 20 May 1945, is an Austrian quantum physicist working on the fundamental aspects and applications of quantum entanglement.

In the 1970s, Zeilinger worked at the Vienna Atominstitut as a research assistant and associate researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Neutron Diffraction Laboratory until 1979, when he accepted the position of assistant professor at the same Atominstitut. That year he qualified as a university professor. at the Vienna University of Technology. In 1981 Zeilinger returned to MIT in 1981 as an associate professor on the physics faculty until 1983. Between 1980 and 1990 he worked as a professor at the Vienna University of Technology, the Technical University of Munich, the University of Innsbruck and the University of Vienna. He was also, between 2004 and 2013, the scientific director of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna between 2004 and 2013. Zeilinger became professor emeritus at the University of Vienna in 2013. He was president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences from 2013 till 2022. Since 2006, Zeilinger is the vice chairman of the board of trustees of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, an ambitious project initiated by Zeilinger's proposal. In 2009, he founded the International Academy Traunkirchen, which is dedicated to the support of gifted students in science and technology. He is a fan of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams, going so far as to name his sailboat 42.