Massamba Thioye

By developing high-performance non-classical light sources and multi-photon interference, Jian-Wei Pan and his colleague Chao-Yang Lu together with their team have implemented boson sampling with up to 76 photons out of a 100-mode interferometer, which yields a Hilbert state space dimension of 10^30 and a rate that is 10^14 faster…

Anuraag is Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of TechNext Inc. During his graduate studies at MIT, Anuraag was a Fellow, at the MIT System Design and Management program. He also held concurrent research assistantships with the MIT Work of the Future Task Force and the MIT International Design Center. $2.2Tn/yr…

The nominating institution Ginkgo Bioworks on the breakthrough: To design a world without waste, Design by Decay designs waste intentionally. It proposes biological decay as a fabrication process, using enzymes and microbes to decompose and compose biological matter at the same time. By mediating decay through species selection, environmental conditions,…

Daniel Garavito’s dream is for all human beings to have access to the knowledge of humanity within reach. For this he created CallsToEducate, bringing education to all corners of the world through a simple call.

The nominating institution Karlsruhe Institute of Technology on the breakthrough: Puchta is a pioneer who demonstrates that CRISPR/Cas as a site-specific nuclease can be used for restructuring complete plant chromosomes. He elucidated major mechanisms of DNA double strand break repair, and he is one of the leading scientists adopting this…

How the Study of Past Civilisations Can Help the Cities of the Future The megacity of Angkor was once the capital of the Khmer nation, an empire which flourished from approximately the 9th to 15th century. With a population near 1 million and an extent of roughly 1000 square kilometers,…

SuperScientists is drawing living ~40 scientists in Africa as the superheroes they are and making trading cards and other materials that teach about science and the people behind it. We want learners to see scientists’ superpowers – catch a single virus and read its genome! – and that they are…

Professor Kevan Shokat at UCSF has achieved a breakthrough in cancer drug discovery.  The protein K-Ras has been described as “undruggable” for almost 40 years since its discovery as the first human oncogene in 1982.  There has been a worldwide hunt for a drug to inhibit its role in cancer,…

Maja Kokot designs, synthesizes, and characterizes novel bacterial topoisomerase inhibitors (NBTIs) with broad antibacterial spectrum activity.

Taking third place was Srilahari Namani of India. She presented a computer-aided method to rapidly identify different species of mosquitos which can be used locally to prevent diseases transmitted by mosquitos.