Kavli Prize 2024

Jun 14, 2024

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Context (IE): The winners of the 2024 Kavli Prize were announced recently.

About the Kavli Prize

It is awarded in honour of Norwegian-American businessman, engineer and philanthropist Fred Kavli.
Introduced in 2008 to support wide-ranging research to improve the quality of life for people worldwide.
Awarded by the US-based Kavli Foundation, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. Handed out by the Norwegian Royal family.
The prize comprises a $1 million cash prize (per field), a scroll, and a medal.
Kavli Prize was designed to be like the Nobel in the fields of astrophysics, neuroscience, and nanoscience.

As per the will of Alfred Nobel, the Nobel Prize is only awarded for achievements made “during the preceding year”. However, the Kavli Prize does not operate under such a restriction.

David Charbonneau of Harvard University and Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for discoveries of exoplanets and the characterisation of their atmosphere.
They devised methods for the detection of atomic species in planetary atmospheres and the measurement of their thermal infrared emission.

Robert Langer of MIT, Armand Paul Alivisatos of the University of Chicago, and Chad Mirkin of Northwestern University for his idea of nano-engineering, a material for the controlled release of therapeutic biomolecules, could help develop controlled drug delivery.
Alivisatos devised semiconductor crystals, or “quantum dots,” that could be used as multi-colour fluorescent probes in bioimaging.
Mirkin introduced the concept of spherical nucleic acid (SNA), a new class of nucleic acids that are densely functionalised and oriented spherically around a nanoparticle core.
SNAs have wide-ranging use in areas like intracellular detection, gene regulation & immunotherapy.

Nancy Kanwisher of MIT, Winrich Freiwald of Rockefeller University, and Doris Tsao of the University of California at Berkeley for their collective effort to map the linkage between facial recognition & brain.
Kinwisher identified the exact brain centre for face processing.
Tsao & Freiwald advanced this knowledge by using functional imaging and recording from individual brain cells to map out the neural architecture of the human brain.

Kavli Prize is differnt than Kavli Medal. Kavli Medal and Lecture is now awarded annually for excellence in all fields of science and engineering relevant to the environment.