The Breakthrough Foundation named Albert Maguire of the Class of 1982 and David Gross, a 2004 Nobel laureate in Physics and Princeton’s Thomas D. Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics, Emeritus, as winners of two of its marquee prizes for outstanding scientific discovery.
Maguire, who concentrated in psychology as a Princeton undergraduate, won the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences “for developing a therapy for inherited retinal degeneration that became the first FDA-approved gene therapy for a genetic disease.” Gross won a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics “for a lifetime of groundbreaking contributions to theoretical physics, from the strong force to string theory, and for tireless advocacy for basic science worldwide.”
Seven other Princetonians were awarded early-career Breakthrough fellowships, including Mingjia Zhang, an instructor in mathematics, who received a Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize; physics Ph.D. candidate Carolina Figueiredo, who received the inaugural Vera Rubin New Frontiers Prize; and four Princeton graduate alumni and one former postdoctoral fellow who received New Horizons in Physics prizes.
“The brilliant scientists who win the Breakthrough Prize are building a cathedral of knowledge on foundations laid down by the giants who came before them,” said prize co-founder Yuri Milner in a statement announcing this year’s winners. “We owe our civilization — and its future — to them.”
Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences: Albert Maguire ’82
Maguire, who is now an emeritus professor of ophthalmology at the University of Pennsylvania, shared the prize with Jean Bennett, the F.M. Kirby Professor of Ophthalmology at Penn, and Katherine High of Penn, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Rockefeller University.
The prize recognizes their work leading to the first FDA-approved gene replacement therapy, a treatment for Leber congenital amaurosis, a rare retinal disease that often results in total blindness in early adulthood.
“The husband-and-wife team of molecular biologist Bennett and ophthalmic surgeon Maguire invented and developed the therapy from first conception to an effective treatment in animal models (including restoring sight to a number of Swedish Briard dogs which they went on to adopt),” the Breakthrough announcement noted. “In 2005, High, a physician-scientist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) invited Bennett and Maguire to collaborate on a human trial. … The three physician-scientists worked together to design the pivotal trial.”
In the years since they developed their treatments, not only have their results proved long-lasting, but more than 100 retinal gene therapy trials have followed in their footsteps, including several now in late-stage clinical testing.
Maguire said that in accepting the Breakthrough Prize, he felt like a team captain hoisting a trophy on behalf of the hundreds of scientists and physicians who worked together to develop the genetic therapy. “It was an international, academic effort. So I feel fortunate to be the one to hoist the trophy, but I’m hoisting it for the entire team.”
Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics: Emeritus Professor David Gross
Gross, now with the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California-Santa Barbara, was honored for his six decades as a leader in the field of particle physics. His citation referenced his 1973 discovery of how quarks operate within the nucleus, which unlocked the strong nuclear force — a finding for which he and his graduate student Frank Wilczek *75 won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Gross’ Breakthrough Prize also highlighted his subsequent contributions to theoretical physics, including a simplified quantum field theory known as heterotic string theory, which attempts to unify all the fundamental forces, including gravity, into a single framework.
The citation additionally noted his many leadership roles in the physics community, including helping to establish physics institutes in India, China and South America. Last year he co-authored a consensus study report, “Elementary Particle Physics: The Higgs and Beyond,” for the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, in which the authors laid out a 40-year plan for the future of physics.
Gross joined Princeton’s physics faculty in 1969 and remained at Princeton through 1997, at which point he transferred to emeritus status and became the director of the Kavli Institute.
Current Princetonians honored
Mingjia Zhang, an instructor in mathematics at Princeton and a von Neumann Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, won a Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize “for contributions to the theory of Shimura varieties.”
Zhang has investigated the Langlands program and p-adic Hodge theory, and she is interested in the geometry and cohomology of Shimura varieties, as well as their relationship to their local analogues.
Her citation noted that she “provided a way to better understand the geometry of Mantovan’s celebrated ‘product formula’ in number theory.”
Zhang came to Princeton and IAS in 2023.
Graduate student Carolina Figueiredo won the inaugural Vera Rubin New Frontiers Prize “for contributions to the geometric structure of scattering amplitudes, revealing hidden relations among quantum field theories.”
Figueiredo works with adviser Nima Arkani-Hamed, himself a former Breakthrough Prize winner, who is a visiting lecturer with the rank of professor in physics at Princeton and a professor of particle physics in the School of Natural Sciences at IAS.
The new prize honors Vera Rubin, a legendary astrophysicist who received an honorary doctorate from Princeton in 2005.
After this year, when Figueiredo is the only winner, the prize will be awarded to three women within two years of their Ph.D.s who have already made important contributions to physics.
Graduate alumni and postdoctoral fellows honored
Thomas Dumitrescu, a 2013 Ph.D. graduate in physics now at the University of California-Los Angeles, shared a New Horizons in Physics Prize with three colleagues “for generalizing the notion of symmetry in various ways, and for exploring the consequences of these generalized symmetries, in quantum field theory, particle physics, condensed matter physics, string theory, and quantum information theory.”
J. Colin Hill, a 2014 Ph.D. graduate in astrophysics now at Columbia University and Mathew Madhavacheril, a 2016-19 astrophysics postdoctoral research fellow now at the University of Pennsylvania, shared a New Horizons in Physics Prize with four other scholars “for advances in cosmic microwave background and supernovae cosmology.”
Benjamin Safdi, a 2014 Ph.D. graduate in physics now at the University of California-Berkeley, won a New Horizons in Physics Prize “for proposing new ways to seek axion-like particles with laboratory experiments and astronomical observations.”
Anna Skorobogatova, a 2024 Ph.D. graduate in mathematics now at ETH Zürich, won a Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize “for contributions to geometric measure theory.”
Long-awaited celebration for Cliff Brangwynne
Along with this year’s honorees, the ceremony included an appearance by Princeton bioengineer Cliff Brangwynne to accept his 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, along with co-recipient Anthony Hyman of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, for their “groundbreaking discovery of a new fundamental mechanism of cellular organization.” Brangwynne and Hyman’s opportunity to accept their awards had been delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Brangwynne is the June K. Wu ’92 Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and director of Princeton’s Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute. His acceptance remarks included encouragement for “all those kids who don’t quite fit in.” His advice: “Be yourself, get comfortable being uncomfortable, and stay curious.”
The Breakthrough Foundation, co-founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki, has awarded more than $340 million to scientists over the past 15 years. Information about all of this year’s laureates and the awards ceremony, held in Hollywood, is available on the Breakthrough Prize website. The 2026 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony was held on April 18 and will air on the Breakthrough Foundation’s YouTube channel on Sunday, April 26, at 3 p.m.
