The Future Science Prize committee announced the laureates of 2026 on August 13th. Hong Zhang receives the Future Science Prize in life sciences for his pioneering contributions to the mechanism and physiological function of autophagy specific in multicellular organisms. Dongyuan Zhao receives the Future Science Prize in physical sciences for pioneering contributions to mesoporous materials in the context of synthetic control, mechanistic understanding, and industrial application. Xinyi Yuan receives the Future Science Prize in mathematics and computer science, for his fundamental contributions to arithmetic geometry, particularly for developing the theory of arithmetic bigness in Arakelov geometry and for its groundbreaking applications to the uniform Bogomolov conjecture and the uniform Mordell conjecture.
2026 Future Science Prize Laureate in Life Sciences
Hong Zhang
Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Citation：
For his pioneering contributions to the mechanism and physiological function of autophagy specific in multicellular organisms.
Hong Zhang has made seminal discoveries regarding the molecular mechanisms unique to autophagy in multicellular organisms. Autophagy (“self-eating”) is a term first proposed by Christian de Duve in 1963. It is an important cellular degradation-recycling mechanism that involves the formation of autophagosome, a double membrane vesicle that encloses and transports cellular proteins, organelles, and pathogens, to lysosome for degradation. The core autophagy (ATG) genes were identified in unicellular organism yeast by Yoshinori Ohsumi. Dr. Zhang pioneered the use of Caenorhabditis elegans to understand the molecular mechanism of autophagy in multicellular organisms. Through his landmark 2010 Cell paper and subsequent research, he identified a suite of multicellular organism-specific autophagy genes, termed EPGs. By elucidating the complex molecular pathways unique to animal autophagy, Dr. Zhang has revealed fundamental insights into their roles in development, physiology, and human disease, deepening our understanding of autophagy regulation in multicellular organisms.
Hong Zhang, Investigator of the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, born in 1969 in Anhui Province, China. He received his doctoral degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the United States in 2001.
2026 Future Science Prize Laureate in Physical Sciences
Dongyuan Zhao
Fudan University
Citation:
For pioneering contributions to mesoporous materials in the context of synthetic control, mechanistic understanding, and industrial application.
Mesoporous materials are solids containing pores of 2-50 nm in diameter. They are indispensable for a broad range of applications, including catalysis, energy conversion and storage, environmental remediation, and biomedicine. How to tune and precisely control the size, order, and surface composition of the pores has long been the Holly Grill in materials chemistry. Up till the late 1990s, it remained a challenge to synthesize ordered mesoporous materials with tunable pore sizes, diverse compositions, and broad functionalities.
Since 1998, Zhao has developed many innovative, robust, and scalable methods based on molecular self-assembly to produce ordered mesoporous solids with unprecedented precision in terms of pore size, compositional, and structural controls. One of the major contributions by Zhao is a thorough understanding of the self-assembly process under different experimental conditions. The synthetic methods developed by Zhao have been widely adopted worldwide to produce functional porous materials with well-controlled properties for a broad range of applications. His original studies greatly expanded the scope of mesoporous materials and rapidly transformed them into a class of technologically important materials.
Zhao’s innovative work has brought mesoporous materials to the forefront of chemistry, materials science, and nanotechnology by establishing these functional materials as a transformative platform for broad applications in heterogeneous catalysis, energy storage and conversion, environmental protection, and biomedicine. Significantly, he has bridged fundamental research with practical application, translating his innovations into impactful industrial technologies, such as heavy-oil/residual-oil hydrocracking in petrochemical industry, silicon-carbon anodes for Li-batteries, and low-dielectric (low-k) materials for printed circuit boards.
Representative Publications:
[1] Science 1998, 279, 548–552.
[2] Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2005, 44, 7053–7059.
[3] J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2008, 130, 28–29.
[4] Nat. Rev. Mater. 2016, 1, 16023.
Dongyuan Zhao was born in 1963 in Shenyang, Liaoning. He received his Ph.D. in 1990 from Jilin University. He is currently a professor at Fudan University.
2026 Future Science Prize Laureate in Mathematics and Computer Science
Xinyi Yuan
Peking University
Citation：
For his fundamental contributions to arithmetic geometry, particularly for developing the theory of arithmetic bigness in Arakelov geometry and for its groundbreaking applications to the uniform Bogomolov conjecture and the uniform Mordell conjecture.
Xinyi Yuan has made fundamental contributions to arithmetic geometry. His pioneering work on arithmetic bigness in Arakelov geometry, first developed in his Ph.D. thesis and culminating in a landmark publication, has transformed the study of small points on algebraic varieties. More recently, he established the uniform Bogomolov conjecture over global fields, and further proved a striking quantitative form of the uniform Mordell conjecture originally proposed by Barry Mazur.
Arithmetic geometry studies algebraic equations over the integers using methods from algebraic geometry. It is a modern development of a subject dating back to Diophantus in the third century. Landmark achievements in the field include the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem by Andrew Wiles in 1994, the proof of the Mordell conjecture by Gerd Faltings in 1983 (for which he received the Fields Medal in 1986), and the proof of the Bogomolov conjecture by Emmanuel Ullmo and Shou-Wu Zhang in 1998.
Yuan developed the theory of arithmetic bigness. Generalizing the foundational work of Szpiro, Ullmo, and Zhang, he introduced powerful new techniques for studying the equidistribution of small points on arithmetic varieties. His theory has become a fundamental tool in both arithmetic geometry and arithmetic dynamics. He proved the uniform Bogomolov conjecture over global fields by his theory of arithmetic bigness. Furthermore, in a collaboration with Jiawei Yu and Shengxuan Zhou, he obtained a quantitative and effective version of the uniform Mordell conjecture proposed by Barry Mazur in the 1980s. While Dimitrov, Gao, Habegger, and Kühne established Mazur's conjecture in 2021, Yuan's works provided a powerful geometric perspective and proved explicit quantitative bounds, representing a major advance in Diophantine geometry.
Beyond his influential works mentioned above, Yuan has made major collaborative contributions with Shou-Wu Zhang and Wei Zhang, including extensions of the Gross–Zagier formula and the proof of the averaged Colmez conjecture. These results have played important roles in subsequent breakthroughs on special cases of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture and the André–Oort conjecture.
Xinyi Yuan is a Professor of Mathematics at Peking University. He was born in 1981 in Macheng, Hubei Province, China, received his B.S. from Peking University in 2003, and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2008.
The Future Science Prize was established in 2016 by a group of Chinese scientists and entrepreneurs. Focused on original basic research, the prize invites international peer review and is decided by a professional committee of distinguished scientists.
The work recognized by the Future Science Prize must satisfy each of the following criteria:
01. Have a seminal and profound impact internationally；
02. Exhibit originality and long-term significance, and/or have stood the test of time；
03. Completed mainly in the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Macao, or Taiwan. There is no restriction on the nationalities of the nominees.
There are three major categories at present, namely the “Life Science Prize”, the “Physical Science Prize”, and the “Mathematics and Computer Science Prize”, with each award of 1 million US dollars respectively.
The Future Science Prize has been awarded to 49 laureates since 2016. All laureates are highly accomplished, widely recognized scientists whose research has made extraordinary impacts in life sciences, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and computer science.
The 2026 Future Science Prize Week and the Award Ceremony will be held in Hong Kong from November 6 to 9, 2026. (End)
Future Science Prize website: https://www.futureprize.org
