The Shaw Prize Foundation has announced that it will hold a virtual award ceremony on Thursday 20 May 2021, in honour of the recipients of the 2020 Shaw Prize. Among those celebrated will be Roger D. Blandford, who won the 2020 Shaw Prize in Astronomy for his wide-ranging contributions to theoretical astrophysics. All are invited to join the event, which will be livestreamed on the Shaw Prize website at 18:00 HKT.

The 2020 Shaw Laureates were announced in May last year, and the award ceremony was scheduled to be held in September 2020. However, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ceremony could not go ahead as planned. The event on 20 May 2021 will be the Shaw Prize’s first virtual ceremony, and an opportunity to toast the exceptional achievements of the 2020 Shaw Laureates.

Promoting scientific excellence is a key aim of both the Shaw Prize and the IAU. Since 2019, the two organisations have been working together towards this shared goal, through activities such as the annual Shaw-IAU Workshop on Astronomy for Education.

In addition to astronomy, the Shaw Prize is awarded in two other categories: Life Science & Medicine and Mathematical Sciences. The joint winners of the 2020 prize for Life Science & Medicine are Gero Miesenböck, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel, for their work on optogenetics, a technology that has revolutionised neuroscience. The winners of the 2020 prize for Mathematical Sciences are Alexander Beilinson and David Kazhdan, for their profound contributions to representation theory, as well as to many other areas of mathematics.

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The IAU is the international astronomical organisation that brings together more than 12 000 active professional astronomers from more than 100 countries worldwide. Its mission is to promote and safeguard astronomy in all its aspects, including research, communication, education and development, through international cooperation. The IAU also serves as the internationally recognised authority for assigning designations to celestial bodies and the surface features on them. Founded in 1919, the IAU is the world's largest professional body for astronomers.

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Peggy Ng
Shaw Prize
Email: peggy@shawprize.org 

Lars Lindberg Christensen
IAU Press Officer
Cell: +49 173 38 72 621
Email: lars@eso.org