The Gruber Foundation announced May 10 it will award $1.5 million to scientists who have made outstanding contributions to the fields of genetics, neuroscience, and cosmology.
The Yale-based Gruber International Prize Program annually honors individuals whose research inspires and enables fundamental shifts in knowledge and culture.
“My late husband, Peter Gruber, and I established an International Prize Program in 2000 to honor and encourage outstanding individuals in the sciences and human rights,” says Patricia Gruber, co-founder and president emeritus. “In a succession plan to perpetuate this legacy, The Gruber Foundation was established at Yale in 2011. My husband would likely have been as delighted as I am today to see the continuing vitality of the sciences in the 2018 Gruber Prize recipients, as well as in all the Gruber programs at Yale.”
The 2018 Gruber Cosmology Prize recipients
The Planck Team and members Jean-Loup Puget and Nazzareno Mandolesi, the leaders of the high-frequency and low-frequency instrument consortia, respectively.
The Planck Team, part of an international collaboration organized by the European Space Agency, mapped the temperature and polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation with the ESA Planck spacecraft. Planck measured, with unprecedented precision, the matter content and geometry of the universe, the imprint on the CMB of hot gas in galaxy clusters and of gravitational lensing by large-scale structure, constrained a hypothetical `inflationary’ phase, pinned down when the first stars formed, and provided unique information about interstellar dust and magnetic fields in our Galaxy.
The 2018 Gruber Genetics Prize recipients
Joanne Chory of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Elliot Meyerowitz of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
These two renowned scientists are receiving this prestigious prize for their groundbreaking work in identifying the basic regulatory and biochemical mechanisms underlying the development of plants. Their discoveries revolutionized the field of plant molecular biology, with broad implications for global agriculture, the environment, and human health and disease.
The 2018 Gruber Neuroscience Prize recipients
Ann M. Graybiel, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Okihide Hikosaka, of the National Institutes of Health’s National Eye Institute; and Wolfram Schultz, of the University of Cambridge.
These renowned scientists are receiving the prestigious prize for their pioneering and inspiring work on the structure, organization and functions of the basal ganglia, a group of nuclei (clusters of neurons) deep within the forebrain. Their work has fundamentally transformed the study of the basal ganglia and has led to influential new ideas about how the brain learns and retains new habits and skills, manages movements, and processes rewards for learning and decision-making. It has also deepened our understanding of a wide range of neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders in which the basal ganglia and behavioral control is compromised.
For more information, visit The Gruber Foundation’s website, send e-mail to info@gruber.yale.edu; contact A. Sarah Hreha at 203-432-6231; or write to: The Gruber Foundation, Yale University, Office of Development, PO Box 2038, New Haven, CT 06521.
