2016 Dan David Prize laureates announced

Three prizes of $1 million each were awarded as part of the Dan David Prize in 2016.

15 February 2016
Prof. Inga Clendinnen, a laureate in the category of Social History - New Directions.

On thursday, February 11th, Prof. Joseph Klafter, Chairman of the Dan David Prize Board of Directors and President of Tel Aviv University, and Prof. Itamar Rabinovich, Chairman of the Dan David Foundation, announced the 2016 Dan David Prize laureates. The announcement took place at the Porter School of Environmental Studies at Tel Aviv University. This year, for the first time, three of the nine laureats awarded the Prize were women. 

 

The International Dan David Prize, headquartered at Tel Aviv University, annually awards three prizes of US$1 Million each for outstanding achievements in the three time dimensions – Past, Present and Future. The Dan David Prize is named after international businessman and philanthropist the late Dan David. 

 

The 2016 Dan David Prize laureates, in the Past, Present and Future Time Dimensions are:

 

Past Time Dimension: Social History – New Directions

Prof. Inga Clendinnen is an outstanding historian focusing on social history and history of cultural practice. Her innovative work has a transnational perspective. Prof. Clendinnen’s studies on the oppression of the Maya and on the Holocaust, describe its cultural origin, conduct and consequences.

 

Prof. Catherine Hall has a signal impact on social history and is one of the pioneers on gender history, race and slavery. While actively involved in the women’s liberation movement, her work focused on women’s history in the 1970s.

 

Prof. Arlette Farge has expanded the meaning of social history and changed it. She engaged in women’s history, urban history, and the history of crime and its policing and control, as well as the history of literacy. Focusing on the margins of society, such as the poor, small artisans, women and children, she redefined the craft of the social historian.

 

Present Time Dimension: Combatting Poverty

Prof. Sir Anthony Atkinson is a world-leading scholar on poverty and equality, concerned with issues of social justice and the design of public policy. His work has focused on rich countries and he has been deeply involved in policy discussion in both Britain and Europe.

 

Prof. François Bourguignon is a world-leading scholar on poverty and equality. His work is global, analyzing poverty and equality within rich and poor countries. He has consistently argued for a better understanding and study of equality and for combining growth, equality and poverty into a single thread.

 

Prof. James Heckman, in his work on early childhood development, promotes the importance of early childhood education, nurture and wellbeing. His findings fundamentally refocus policy attention, claim wide generality and will influence the discussion of global poverty worldwide.

 

Future Time Dimension: Nanoscience

Prof. Paul Alivisatos is considered one of the founders of nanoscience. He pioneered the development of the fundamental building blocks of nanotechnology. Alivisatos and his team first synthesized semiconductor nanocrystals for use as fluorescent probes. His biological quantum dots enabled color-coded identification of multiple cell structures for many biomedical applications.

 

Prof. Chad Mirkin is a highly recognized chemist who pioneered the development of methods for controlling the architecture of nanomolecules and nanomaterials and utilizing such structures in the development of analytical tools that can be used in areas of chemical and biological sensing, lithography and optics. These innovations have changed our fundamental thinking about how to synthesize and manipulate nano structures, and have resulted in processes and devices that have significantly impacted human lives.

 

Prof. Sir John Pendry has brought about a most significant advance in electromagnetism through his concept and designs of a new class of materials, metamaterials, which have led to the manufacturing of lenses that beat the diffraction limit, and cloaks to render objects invisible. He made an equally remarkable contribution by his discovery of the ‘perfect lens’ whose resolution is limited only by perfection of manufacture and not by the wavelength. 

 

The laureates, who donate 10% of their prize money towards 20 doctoral and postdoctoral scholarships, will be honored at a ceremony on Sunday, May 22, 2016, at Tel Aviv University. 

 

Dan David Prize laureates include cellist Yo-Yo Ma (2006), Maestro Zubin Mehta (2007), former Vice President and Nobel Prize laureate Al Gore (2008), former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (2009), Prof. Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of the AIDS virus (2009), Canadian author Margaret Atwood (2010), film directors the Coen Brothers (2011), artist William Kentridge (2012), philosopher Leon Wieseltier (2013), neuropsychologist Prof. Brenda Milner (2014), and Jimmy Wales (2015). 

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