Oscars of Science Prize in Physics awarded to 4 Indian-origin researchers – indica News

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The Breakthrough Prize Foundation has awarded two eminent Indian American professors with the prestigious New Horizons in Physics Prize.

The New Horizons in Physics Prize is awarded to promising junior researchers who have already produced important work, the prize money for the award is of $100,000. Each year, up to three New Horizons in Physics Prizes are awarded.

The prize is nicknamed the Oscars of Science.

Vedika Khemani, assistant professor of physics at Stanford University, and California Institute of Technology Astronomy Professor, Mansi Kasliwal have each been named recipients of the New Horizons in Physics Prize for the year 2022.

Along with these two, another Indian researcher (and two others) from the University of Cambridge in England was also a recipient of this years prize.

Sir Shankar Balasubramanian, along with David Klenerman and Pascal Mayer in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, was honored with the Life Sciences prize for developing next-generation sequencing technologies.

His research allowed for immediate identification and characterization of the Covid-19 virus, rapid development of vaccines, and real-time monitoring of new genetic variants.

Though the vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna relied on decades of work by Katalin Karik and Drew Weissman, the almost immediate identification and characterization of the virus, rapid development of vaccines, and real-time monitoring of new genetic variants would have been impossible without the next-generation sequencing technologies invented by Shankar Balasubramanian, David Klenerman and Pascal Mayer, the press release said.

Before their inventions, re-sequencing a full human genome could take many months and cost millions of dollars; today, it can be done within a day at the cost of around $600, states the press release.

Khemanis work offered a theoretical formulation for the first-time crystals, as well as a blueprint for their experimental creation. But she emphasized that time crystals are only one of the exciting potential outcomes of out-of-equilibrium quantum physics, which is still a nascent field, noted Stanford. The researcher described her work as creating a checklist of what actually makes a time crystal a time crystal, and the measurements needed to experimentally establish its existence, both under ideal and realistic conditions.

In the category 2022 New Horizons in Physics Prize, the scientists of Indian origin include Suchitra Sebastian, University of Cambridge, For high precision electronic and magnetic measurements that have profoundly changed our understanding of high-temperature superconductors and unconventional insulators.

Beyond the main prizes, six New Horizons Prizes, each of $100,000, were distributed between 13 early-career scientists and mathematicians who have already made a substantial impact on their fields. In addition, three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes were awarded to early-career women mathematicians.

Some of the top sponsors for this prize are Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google; Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan; Russian-Israeli entrepreneurs and venture capitalists Yuri and Julia Milner; and Anne Wojcicki, CEO of the personal genomics company 23andMe.

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Oscars of Science Prize in Physics awarded to 4 Indian-origin researchers - indica News