The Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology is an award given by Foresight Nanotech Institute every year for significant advancements in nanotechnology

Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology is the study of manipulating matter on an atomic and molecular scale. Generally, nanotechnology deals with developing materials, devices, or other structures possessing at least one dimension sized from 1 to 100 nanometres...

. It is named in honor of physicist Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman

Richard Phillips Feynman was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics...

, whose 1959 talk There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom

There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom

There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom is the title of a lecture given by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959...

is considered to have inspired the beginning of the field of nanotechnology. The prize was established "to recognize researchers whose recent work has most advanced the field toward the achievement of Feynman's vision for nanotechnology: molecular manufacturing, the construction of atomically precise products through the use of molecular machine systems."

The Foresight Institute also offers the Feynman Grand Prize, a $250,000 award to the first persons to create both a nanoscale robotic arm capable of precise positional control, and a nanoscale 8-bit adder, conforming to given specifications. The Grand Prize is intended to stimulate the field of molecular nanotechnology

Molecular nanotechnology

Molecular nanotechnology is a technology based on the ability to build structures to complex, atomic specifications by means of mechanosynthesis. This is distinct from nanoscale materials...

 in the same way as similar historical prizes such as the Longitude prize

Longitude prize

The Longitude Prize was a reward offered by the British government for a simple and practical method for the precise determination of a ship's longitude...

, Orteig Prize

Orteig Prize

The Orteig Prize was a $25,000 reward offered on May 19, 1919, by New York hotel owner Raymond Orteig to the first allied aviator to fly non-stop from New York City to Paris or vice-versa. On offer for five years, it attracted no competitors...

, Kremer prize, Ansari X Prize

Ansari X Prize

The Ansari X Prize was a space competition in which the X Prize Foundation offered a US$10,000,000 prize for the first non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks...

, and two prizes that were offered by Richard Feynman himself as challenges during his 1959 There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom

There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom

There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom is the title of a lecture given by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959...

talk.

The Foresight Institute offers a number of additional awards, which are the Distinguished Student Award for graduate and undergraduate students, the Prize in Communication for journalism and outreach efforts which promote public understanding of molecular nanotechnology, and Government Prize for government officials.

Feynman prize winners

The prize was first given in 1993. Before 1997, one prize was given biennially. From 1997 on, two prizes were given each year in Theory and Experimental categories.

Single prize

Year	Laureate		Institution/Country	Rationale
1993		Charles Musgrave	California Institute of Technology	"for his work on modeling a hydrogen abstraction tool useful in nanotechnology"
1995		Nadrian C. Seeman Nadrian Seeman Nadrian C. "Ned" Seeman is an American nanotechnologist and crystallographer known for inventing the field of DNA nanotechnology.Seeman studied biochemistry at the University of Chicago and crystallography at the University of Pittsburgh...	New York University	"for developing ways to construct three-dimensional structures, including cubes and more complex polyhedra, from synthesized DNA molecules"

Experimental category

Year	Laureate		Institution/Country	Rationale
1997		James K. Gimzewski	IBM Zurich Research Laboratory	"for work using scanning probe microscopes to manipulate molecules"
		Reto Schlittler
		Christian Joachim	CEMES-CNRS
1998		M. Reza Ghadiri	Scripps Research Institute	"for groundbreaking work in constructing molecular structures through the use of self-organization, the same forces used to assemble the molecular machine systems found in nature"
1999		Phaedon Avouris Phaedon Avouris Phaedon Avouris is a Greek American chemical physicist. He is an IBM Fellow and the group leader for Nanometer Scale Science and Technology at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.-Education and Research Interests:...	IBM	"[for] the development of carbon nanotubes for potential computing device applications"
2000		R. Stanley Williams R. Stanley Williams Richard Stanley Williams is research scientist in the field of nanotechnology and a Senior Fellow and the founding director of the Quantum Science Research laboratory at HP. He has over 57 patents, with 40 more patents pending...	HP Labs	"for building a molecular switch, a major step toward their long-term goal of building entire memory chips that are just a hundred nanometers wide"
		Philip Kuekes
		James R. Heath James R. Heath James R. Heath is an American chemist and the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology.- Early years :...	University of California at Los Angeles
2001		Charles M. Lieber	Harvard University	"for his pioneering experimental work in molecular nanotechnology which included seminal contributions to the synthesis and characterization of the unique physical properties of carbon nanotubes and nanowires"
2002		Chad Mirkin Chad Mirkin Chad A. Mirkin is an American chemist. He is the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Medicine, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology and Center for Nanofabrication and Molecular Self-Assembly at...	Northwestern University	"for opening up new possibilities for the fabrication of molecular machine systems by selectively functionalizing nanoparticles and surfaces, particularly with DNA, enabling the self-assembly of new structures which move us closer to the goal of molecular manufacturing"
2003		Carlo Montemagno	University of California at Los Angeles	"for his pioneering research into methods of integrating single molecule biological motors with nano-scale silicon devices, which opens up new possibilities for nanomachines"
2004		Homme Hellinga	Duke University	"for his achievement in the engineering of atomically precise devices capable of precise manipulation of other molecular structures"
2005		Christian Schafmeister	University of Pittsburgh	"for his work in developing a novel technology synthesizing macromolecules of intermediate sizes (between 1000 and 10,000 Daltons) with designed shapes and functions"
2006		Erik Winfree Erik Winfree Erik Winfree is an American computer scientist, bioengineer, and associate professor at California Institute of Technology. He is a leading researcher into DNA computing and DNA nanotechnology....	California Institute of Technology	"for their work demonstrating that DNA tiles can be designed to form crystalline nanotubes that exhibit a stiffness greater than the biological protein nanofilament actin, [and for having] established that algorithmic self-assembly could work well enough to generate non-trivial non-periodic patterns"
		Paul W. K. Rothemund Paul W. K. Rothemund Paul W.K. Rothemund is a senior research fellow at the Computation and Neural Systems department at Caltech. He has become known in the fields of DNA nanotechnology and synthetic biology for his pioneering work with DNA origami. Rothemund is a 2007 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.Rothemund...
2007		J. Fraser Stoddart James Fraser Stoddart Sir James Fraser Stoddart is a Scottish chemist currently at the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University. He works in the area of supramolecular chemistry and nanotechnology...	University of California at Los Angeles	"[for having] pioneered the synthesis and assembly of unique active molecular machines for manufacturing into practical nanoscale devices"
2008		James Tour James Tour James M. Tour is a synthetic organic chemist, specializing in nanotechnology.-Career:He is well-known for his work in molecular electronics and molecular switching molecules. He has also been involved in other work, such as the creation of a nanocar and NanoKids, an interactive learning DVD to...	Rice University	"for the Synthesis of Nanocars... and other molecular machines [which] is providing critical insight in investigations of bottom-up molecular manufacturing"
2009		Yoshiaki Sugimoto	Osaka University	"in recognition of their pioneering experimental demonstrations of mechanosynthesis, specifically the use of atomic resolution dynamic force microscopy — also known as non-contact atomic force microscopy (NC-AFM) — for vertical and lateral manipulation of single atoms on semiconductor surfaces"
		Masayuki Abe
		Oscar Custance	National Institute for Materials Science, Japan
2010		Masakazu Aono	MANA Center, National Institute for Materials Science, Japan	"in recognition of his pioneering and continuing work, including research into the manipulation of atoms, the multiprobe STM and AFM, the atomic switch, and single-molecule-level chemical control including ultradense molecular data storage and molecular wiring; and his inspiration of an entire generation of researchers who have made their own ground-breaking contributions to nanotechnology"

Theory category

Year	Laureate		Institution/Country	Rationale
1997		Charles Bauschlicher	NASA Ames, MRJ Team	"for work in computational nanotechnology"
		Stephen Barnard
		Creon Levit
		Glenn Deardorff
		Al Globus
		Jie Han
		Richard Jaffe
		Alessandra Ricca
		Marzio Rosi
		Deepak Srivastava
		H. Thuemmel
1998		Ralph C. Merkle	Zyvex, LLC	"for their computational modeling of molecular tools for atomically-precise chemical reactions"
		Stephen Walch	ELORET NASA Ames
1999		William A. Goddard III	California Institute of Technology	"for their work in modeling the operation of molecular machine designs"
		Tahir Cagin
		Yue Qi
2000		Uzi Landman Uzi Landman Uzi Landman is a computational physicist, the Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Computational Materials Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received the Aneesur Rahman prize in computational physics which is the highest honor given by the American Physical Society for work in...	Georgia Institute of Technology	"for his pioneering work in computational materials science for nanostructures"
2001		Mark A. Ratner	Northwestern University	"[for being] a theorist whose work has made major contributions to the development and success of nanometer-scale electronic devices"
2002		Don Brenner	North Carolina State University	"for fundamental advances in our ability to model molecular machine systems, and for the design and analysis of components likely to be important in future molecular manufacturing systems"
2003		Marvin L. Cohen Marvin L. Cohen Marvin L. Cohen is a Canadian-born American physicist. He is a professor of condensed matter physics and materials science at the University of California, Berkeley. Nobel laureate Robert B. Laughlin studied under John D. Joannopoulos, a student of Cohen's.Cohen received his PhD from the...	University of California at Berkeley	"for their contributions to the understanding of the behavior of materials"
		Steven G. Louie Steven Gwon Sheng Louie Steven Gwon Sheng Louie is a computational condensed-matter physicist. He is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and senior faculty scientist in the Materials Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where his research focuses on nanoscience...
2004		David Baker David Baker (biochemist) David Baker is an American biochemist and computational biologist who studies methods to predict the three-dimensional structures of proteins. He is a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Washington, where he is the principal investigator of the 30+ member...	University of Washington	"for their development of RosettaDesign, a program that has a high success rate in designing stable protein structures with a specified backbone folding structure"
		Brian Kuhlman	University of North Carolina
2005		Christian Joachim	Center Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, France	"for developing theoretical tools and establishing the principles for design of a wide variety of single molecular functional nanomachines"
2006		Erik Winfree Erik Winfree Erik Winfree is an American computer scientist, bioengineer, and associate professor at California Institute of Technology. He is a leading researcher into DNA computing and DNA nanotechnology....	California Institute of Technology	"for their 'Theory in Molecular Computation and Algorithmic Self-assembly' research... based on their demonstration of methods for universal computation with DNA, including using DNA tiles to simulate cellular automata"
		Paul W. K. Rothemund Paul W. K. Rothemund Paul W.K. Rothemund is a senior research fellow at the Computation and Neural Systems department at Caltech. He has become known in the fields of DNA nanotechnology and synthetic biology for his pioneering work with DNA origami. Rothemund is a 2007 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.Rothemund...
2007		David A. Leigh David Leigh (scientist) David Alan Leigh FRS is the Forbes Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh.He is noted for the development of new methods to construct rotaxanes, catenanes and molecular knots and for the invention of some of the first synthetic molecular motors and functional nanomachines...	University of Edinburgh, UK	"[for] the design and synthesis of artificial molecular motors and machines from first principles and... the construction of molecular machine systems that function in the realm of Brownian motion"
2008		George C. Schatz George C. Schatz George C. Schatz is a theoretical chemist best known for his seminal contributions to the field of reaction dynamics. Born in Watertown, New York, he obtained his B. A. from Clarkson University and his Ph. D. from Caltech under Aron Kuppermann...	Northwestern University	"first for sophisticated modeling and optimization of the dip pen nanolithography method of nanofabrication, and second, for his explanation of plasmon effects in metallic nanodots"
2009		Robert A. Freitas Jr.	Institute for Molecular Manufacturing	"in recognition of his pioneering theoretical work in mechanosynthesis in which he proposed specific molecular tools and analyzed them using ab initio quantum chemistry to validate their ability to build complex molecular structures, [and] also his previous work in systems design of molecular machines, including replicating molecular manufacturing systems, which should eventually be able to make large atomically precise products economically, and the design of medical nanodevices, which should eventually revolutionize medicine"
2010		Gustavo E. Scuseria	Rice University	"for his development of quantum mechanical methods and computational programs that make it possible to carry out accurate theoretical predictions of molecules and solids, and their application to the chemical and electronic properties of carbon nanostructures"

External links

• Foresight Nanotech Institute Prize
• List of past winners and explanation of the prize