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, regardless of race, nationality and religious belief, who have achieved significant breakthroughs in academic and scientific research or application, and whose work has resulted in a positive and profound impact on mankind." The prize, widely regarded as the "Nobel of the East", is named after Sir Run Run Shaw (邵逸夫), a leader in the Hong Kong media industry and a long-time philanthropist.

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 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 million as of 2008.

As of 2011, 25 prizes have been awarded to 43 individuals. The inaugural winner for the Astronomy award was Canadian P. James E. Peebles; he was honoured for his contributions to cosmology. Two inaugural prizes were awarded for the Life Science and Medicine category: Americans Stanley N. Cohen, Herbert W. 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, six of the 2012 Nobel laureates—Jules A. Hoffmann, Bruce A. Beutler, Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, Shinya Yamanaka and Brian P. Schmidt—were previous laureates of the Shaw Prize.