Shaw Prize

The Shaw Prize is an annual award first presented by the Shaw Prize Foundation in 2004. Established in 2002 in Hong Kong, it honours living

"individuals who are currently active in their respective fields and who have recently achieved distinguished and significant advances, who have made outstanding contributions in academic and scientific research or applications, or who in other domains have achieved excellence. The award is dedicated to furthering societal progress, enhancing quality of life, and enriching humanity's spiritual civilization."

The prize is widely regarded as the "Nobel of the East" which suggests that it is secondary only to the Nobel prize in terms of reputation and recognition. It is named after Sir Run Run Shaw (邵逸夫), who was a philanthropist and forerunner in the Hong Kong media industry.

The prize is for recent achievements in the fields of astronomy, life science and medicine, and mathematical sciences; it is not awarded posthumously. Nominations are submitted by invited individuals beginning each year in September. The award winners are then announced in the summer, and receive the prize at the ceremony in early autumn. The winners receive a medal and a certificate. The front of the medal bears a portrait of Shaw as well as the English and the Traditional Chinese name of the prize; the back bears the year, the category, the name of the winner and a Chinese quotation of philosopher Xun Zi (制天命而用之, which means "Grasp the law of nature and make use of it"). In addition, the winner receives a sum of money, which is worth US$1.2 million from 1 October 2015.

As of 2012, 28 prizes have been awarded to 48 individuals. The inaugural winner for the Astronomy award was Canadian Jim Peebles; he was honoured for his contributions to cosmology. Two inaugural prizes were awarded for the Life Science and Medicine category: Americans Stanley Norman Cohen, Herbert Boyer and Yuet-Wai Kan jointly won one of the prizes for their works pertaining to DNA while British physiologist Sir Richard Doll won the other for his contribution to cancer epidemiology. Shiing-Shen Chern of China won the inaugural Mathematical Sciences award for his work on differential geometry.

Of note, seven of the Nobel laureates—Jules Hoffmann, Bruce Beutler, Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, Shinya Yamanaka, Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Schmidt—were previous laureates of the Shaw Prize.