The international Wolf Prizes are awarded to outstanding scientists and artists from around the world, for achievements in the interest of mankind and friendly relations amongst peoples. The scientific categories of the prize include Medicine, Agriculture, Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics. It takes place annually and the prize in each field consists of $100,000.
ERC grantees Wolf laureates
Jonathan Jones – Wolf Prize in Agriculture, 2025
He was awarded the Wolf Prize 2025 for groundbreaking discoveries of the immune system and disease resistance in plants.
- Read bio Jonathan Jones
Jonathan Dallas George Jones, born 14 July 1954, is a senior scientist at The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL) and a professor at the University of East Anglia, where he uses molecular and genetic approaches to study disease resistance in plants.
Jones was educated at the University of Cambridge where he studied Natural Sciences and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Botany in 1976, followed by a PhD in Genetics in 1980. He then did postdoctoral research at Harvard University in Frederick M. Ausubel's lab on symbiotic nitrogen fixation. At the Sainsbury Laboratory since 1988, he cloned several of the first identified plant immune receptors. With collaborator Jeffery Dangl, he proposed the zigzag model for activation of defence via pattern-triggered cell surface and effector-triggered intracellular immune receptors. Previously, it was thought that pattern-triggered immunity and effector-triggered immunity functioned independently, but Jones and colleagues went on to demonstrate that these pathways are interdependent and potentiate each other, synergistically reaching an effective threshold of plant immunity.
Jones served as head of the Sainsbury Laboratory from 1994 to 1997 and 2003 – 2009. He is also a professor at University of East Anglia and has served as editor of The Plant Cell and Genome Biology. Other positions he has held include: International Society of Plant Molecular Biology board member 1995-8, Editor of Plant Cell July 1998 -2004, Current Opinion in Plant Biology (COPB) Editorial Board 1997–present, Editor of Genome Biology 2001–2004, and co-Founder of Mendel Biotechnology. He also cofounded Norfolk Plant Sciences that is bringing a GM purple tomato to market in the US, and is working with biopotatoes.com to bring a precision bred disease resistant potato to market in the UK.
Jones was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2003 and has been an International member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2015. He was awarded EMBO Membership in 1998.
Mordehai "Moty" Heiblum – Wolf Prize in Physics, 2025
He won the for advancing our understanding of the surprising properties of two-dimensional electron systems in strong magnetic fields.
- Read bio Mordehai "Moty" Heiblum
Mordehai "Moty" Heiblum, born May 25, 1947, in Holon, is an Israeli electrical engineer and condensed matter physicist, known for his research in mesoscopic physics.
Heiblum graduated in electrical engineering from the Technion with a bachelor's degree in 1973 and from Carnegie-Mellon University with a master's degree in 1974. In 1978 he received his Ph.D. with the thesis Characteristics of metal-oxide-metal devices. Then Heiblum joined the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Centre for 12 years. Heiblum returned in 1990 to Israel and established at the Weizmann Institute, with the support of Professor Yoseph Imry, the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Center for Submicron Research with the mission to ‘study and develop submicron semiconductor structures working in the mesoscopic regime.’ Heiblum has headed the Submicron Center since its founding in 1990. That same year he was appointed a full professor at the Weizmann Institute. He established the Department of Condensed Matter Physics at the Weizmann Institute and was its first director from 1993 to 1996 and from 2007 to 2012 he was again its director. In 2000 he was appointed to the Alex and Ida Susan Professorial Chair of Submicron Studies. From 1991 to 1992, headed a government committee that advised the Minister of Science on how to encourage the microelectronics industry in the State of Israel. Since 2001, he has chaired the board of directors of Braude College of Engineering. From 1993 to 1996, he was a visiting professor for several weeks each summer at the Vienna University of Technology. From 1996 to 1997 he was on sabbatical as a visiting professor at Stanford University in combination with Hewlett Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California. He was an editor for the journal Semiconductor Science and Technology.
In 1986 Heiblum received the IBM Outstanding Innovation Award, and in 2013 the EMET Prize. He was elected a life fellow of the IEEE, a fellow of the American Physical Society (1990), and a member of Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2008). In 2008, he received the Rothschild Prize in physics. In 2021, he was received the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize.
Anne L'Huillier and Ferenc Krausz – Wolf Prize in Physics, 2022
They won the Wolf Prize in Physics for pioneering contributions to ultrafast laser science and attosecond physics.
- Read bio Anne L'Huillier
Anne L'Huillier, born 1958, is a French-Swedish physicist, and professor of atomic physics at Lund University in Sweden.
L'Huillier studied physics and mathematics at the University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. Her PhD was in experimental physics at the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives in Saclay Nuclear Research Centre. As a post-doctoral fellow, she was in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Los Angeles, California, United States. From 1986 to 1995, she was employed at the Saclay Nuclear Research Centre. In 1995 she moved to Lund University, Sweden, becoming professor in 1997. L'Huillier has been a member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences since 2004.
- Read bio Ferenc Krausz
Ferenc Krausz, born 17 May 1962, is a Hungarian-Austrian physicist, whose research team has generated and measured the first attosecond light pulse and used it for capturing electrons’ motion inside atoms, marking the birth of attophysics.
Krausz studied theoretical physics at Eötvös Loránd University and electrical engineering at the Technical University of Budapest in Hungary. After his habilitation at the Technical University of Vienna, in Austria, he became professor at the same institute. In 2003 he was appointed director at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and in 2004 became chair of experimental physics at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. In 2006 he co-founded the Munich-Centre of Advanced Photonics (MAP) and began serving as one of its directors. In 2018, he initiated the Center for Molecular Fingerprinting in Budapest, Hungary, for pursuing the validation of a novel at to second-metrology-based platform for health monitoring.
Giorgio Parisi - Wolf Prize in Physics, 2021
He won the Wolf Prize in Physics for his ground-breaking discoveries in disordered systems, particle physics, and statistical physics.
- Read bio Giorgio Parisi
Giorgio Parisi, born 4 August 1948, is an Italian theoretical physicist, whose research has focused on quantum field theory, statistical mechanics and complex systems.Parisi received his degree from the University of Rome La Sapienza in 1970 under the supervision of Nicola Cabibbo. He was a researcher at the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati (1971–1981) and a visiting scientist at the Columbia University (1973–1974), Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (1976–1977), and École Normale Supérieure (1977–1978). From 1981 until 1992 he was a full professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and he is now professor of Quantum Theories at the Sapienza University of Rome. He is a member of the Simons Collaboration "Cracking the Glass Problem". From 2018 until 2021 he was the president of the Accademia dei Lincei.
Caroline Dean - Wolf Prize in Agriculture, 2020
She won the Wolf Prize in Agriculture for pioneering discoveries in flowering time control and epigenetic basis of vernalization.
- Read bio Caroline Dean
Caroline Dean, born 2 April 1957, is a British plant scientist working at the John Innes Centre. She is focused on understanding the molecular controls used by plants to seasonally judge when to flower. She is specifically interested in vernalisation — the acceleration of flowering in plants by exposure to periods of prolonged cold. This has taken her into conserved mechanisms of co-transcriptional gene regulation and epigenetic switches.Dean was educated at the University of York, where she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology in 1978 and a PhD. in Biology in 1982. She was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (1999), Fellow of the Royal Society (2004), German Leopoldina Academy (2008), Foreign Member US National Academy of Sciences (2008), Dame Commander of the British Empire (2016).
In 2015 she was awarded the FEBS/EMBO Women in Science Award, in 2018 the L’Oreal/UNESCO Women in Science European Laureate, and in 2020 she won the Wolf Prize in Agriculture “for pioneering discoveries in flowering time control and epigenetic basis of vernalization.” She has also been on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2018.
Simon Donaldson - Wolf Prize in Mathematics, 2020
He won the Wolf Prize in Mathematics for contributions to differential geometry and topology.
- Read bio Simon Kirwan Donaldson
Simon Kirwan Donaldson, born 20 August 1957, is an English mathematician known for his work on the topology of smooth (differentiable) four-dimensional manifolds, Donaldson–Thomas theory, and his contributions to Kähler geometry.After gaining his DPhil degree from Oxford University in 1983, Donaldson was appointed a Junior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He spent the academic year 1983–84 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and returned to Oxford as Wallis Professor of Mathematics in 1985. After spending one year visiting Stanford University, he moved to Imperial College London in 1998 as Professor of Pure Mathematics. In 2014, he joined the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University in New York, United States. From 2014 to 2023, he was a permanent member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University in New York. He is currently a Professor in Pure Mathematics at Imperial College, London.
Jean-François Le Gall - Wolf Prize in Mathematics, 2019
He won the Wolf Prize in Mathematics for his deep and elegant work on stochastic processes.
- Read bio Jean-François Le Gall
Jean-François Le Gall, born 15 November 1959, is a French mathematician working in areas of probability theory such as Brownian motion, Lévy processes, superprocesses and their connections with partial differential equations, the Brownian snake, random trees, branching processes, stochastic coalescence and random planar maps.He received his Ph.D. in 1982 from Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris VI) under the supervision of Marc Yor. He is currently professor at the University of Paris-Saclay in Orsay and has been a senior member of the Institut universitaire de France. He was elected to French academy of sciences, December 2013.
Leif Andersson - Wolf Prize in Agriculture, 2014
He won the Wolf Prize in Agriculture for providing groundbreaking contributions to plant and animal sciences, respectively, by using modern technologies of genomic research.
- Read bio Leif Andersson
Leif Andersson, born 1954, is a Swedish animal geneticist and professor of functional genomics at Uppsala University. Andersson was inducted into the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2002 and is a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2017.After completing his undergraduate degree, Andersson completed his PhD at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. He moved to Uppsala University in 2003. Andersson has pioneered the use of domestic animals as a resource to advance knowledge on genotype-phenotype relationships using genomics. Andersson has explored the domestication of pigs, chicken, rabbits and horses. He has also researched the evolution of Darwin’s finches and their beaks and the genetics of ecological adaptation in Atlantic herring (initially funded by the ERC).
Peter Zoller - Wolf Prize in Physics, 2013
He won the Wolf Prize in Physics for groundbreaking theoretical contributions to quantum information processing, quantum optics and the physics of quantum gases.
- Read bio Peter Zoller
Peter Zoller, born 16 September 1952, is a theoretical physicist from Austria, best known for his pioneering research on quantum computing and quantum communication and for bridging quantum optics and solid state physics. Peter Zoller studied physics at the University of Innsbruck, obtained his doctorate there in February 1977, and became a lecturer at their Institute of Theoretical Physics. For 1978/79, he was granted a Max Kade stipend to research with Peter Lambropoulos at the University of Southern California. In 1991, Peter Zoller was appointed Professor of Physics and JILA Fellow at JILA and at the Physics Department of the University of Colorado, Boulder. At the end of 1994, he accepted a chair at the University of Innsbruck, where he has worked ever since. From 1995 to 1999, he headed the Institute of Theoretical Physics, from 2001 to 2004, he was vice-dean of studies. In 2012/13 he was "Distinguished Fellow" at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Munich. In 2014 he has been elected as an "External Scientific Member" at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics. In 2015 he held the International Jacques Solvay Chair in Physics at the University of Brussels. Since 2003, Peter Zoller has also held the position of Scientific Director at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 2018, Peter Zoller co-founded Alpine Quantum Technologies, a quantum computing hardware company.
David Baulcombe - Wolf Prize in Agriculture, 2010
He won the Wolf Prize in Agriculture for the pioneering discovery of gene regulation by small inhibitory RNA molecules in plants is of profound importance, not only for agriculture, but also for biology as a whole, including the field of medicine.
- Read bio David Charles Baulcombe
David Charles Baulcombe, born 1952, is a British plant scientist and geneticist. Baulcombe did his studies at the University of Edinburgh, where he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1977 for research on Messenger RNA in vascular plants supervised by John Ingle. After his PhD, Baulcombe was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) and the University of Georgia (Athens, Georgia, United States). In December 1980 Baulcombe started his career as an independent scientist at the Plant Breeding Institute (PBI) in Cambridge UK. He joined the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich from 1988 as a senior research scientist and was also Professor at the University of East Anglia since 2002. Since 2007 he has been the Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge (Emeritus since 2019).
In 2010 Baulcombe won the Wolf Prize in Agriculture: “Sir David Baulcombe’s pioneering discovery of gene regulation by small inhibitory RNA molecules in plants is of profound importance, not only for agriculture, but also for biology as a whole, including the field of medicine”.
He has also received the Gruber Genetics Prize (2014), the Balzan Prize (2012) (for epigenetics) (Balzan Foundation, Rome) and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (2008) Lasker Foundation (shared with Ambros and Ruvkun)
Anton Zeilinger - Wolf Prize in Physics, 2010
He won the Wolf Prize in Physics for the fundamental conceptual and experimental contributions to the foundations of quantum physics, specifically an increasingly sophisticated series of tests of Bell’s inequalities or extensions there of using entangled quantum states.
- Read bio Anton Zeilinger
Anton Zeilinger, born 20 May 1945, is an Austrian quantum physicist working on the fundamental aspects and applications of quantum entanglement.In the 1970s, Zeilinger worked at the Vienna Atominstitut as a research assistant and associate researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Neutron Diffraction Laboratory until 1979, when he accepted the position of assistant professor at the same Atominstitut. That year he qualified as a university professor. at the Vienna University of Technology. In 1981 Zeilinger returned to MIT in 1981 as an associate professor on the physics faculty until 1983. Between 1980 and 1990 he worked as a professor at the Vienna University of Technology, the Technical University of Munich, the University of Innsbruck and the University of Vienna. He was also, between 2004 and 2013, the scientific director of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna between 2004 and 2013. Zeilinger became professor emeritus at the University of Vienna in 2013. He was president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences from 2013 till 2022. Since 2006, Zeilinger is the vice chairman of the board of trustees of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, an ambitious project initiated by Zeilinger's proposal. In 2009, he founded the International Academy Traunkirchen, which is dedicated to the support of gifted students in science and technology. He is a fan of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams, going so far as to name his sailboat 42.
