Meet the 2025 Nobel Prize Winners

Fighting for democracy in Venezuela. A one-sentence novel. Molecular structures used to contain toxic gases. Physics experiments that helped lay the groundwork for the cellphone. Groundbreaking discoveries about the immune system. 

These are some of the contributions made by this year’s Nobel Prize winners. Every year, six prizes are awarded to individuals or groups for outstanding contributions across fields including physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, peace, and economic sciences.

President Donald Trumpopenly campaigned for the peace prize but did not receive it. “I deserve it, but they would never give it to me,” said Trump, who was nominated for the prize both this year and in the past, while at the White House with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in February. 

Netanyahu was one of several people who nominated the President for the prize this year. He also received nominations from the Pakistani government, for his role in de-escalating conflict between the country and India, and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, for helping to broker a ceasefire deal between his country and Thailand, among others.

Read more: Trump Loses Nobel Peace Prize He Shamelessly Campaigned For

There were 338 candidates for the peace prize this year, including 244 individuals and 94 organizations, the Nobel committee said. Past winners of the prize include President Barack Obama in 2009, Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk in 1993, and Mother Teresa in 1979.

The prizes are awarded out of Stockholm, Sweden, in December. The laureates, or winners, receive a diploma, a medal, and a cash award, the last of which is worth 11 million Swedish kronor this year, or roughly $1.17 million. The word “laureate” refers to laurel wreaths, which were awarded to victors in Ancient Greece as a sign of honor. 

Here’s what you should know about the 2025 Nobel Prize winners.

Peace

María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, was awarded the prize for fighting dictatorship and promoting democracy in her country for nearly 25 years. 

“As the leader of the democracy movement in Venezuela, Maria Corina Machado is one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times,” the Nobel Committee said. 

Machado has led the movement against Venezuela's authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro, whose last two victories have not been recognized by foreign governments such as the U.S. amid accusations of widespread fraud and voter suppression. During Maduro’s 12-year tenure, the country’s government has been widely accused of human-rights abuses and corruption, with the increasing political repression and an economic crisis leading to the exodus of an estimated eight million people across the region. 

Machado similarly fought to preserve Venezuela's fragile democracy while Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, was in office from 1999 until his death in 2013. She co-founded the vote-monitoring group Súmate in the early 2000s and later ran for and won a seat in Venezuela’s National Assembly in 2010, where she served until she was stripped of her seat 2014 for what critics have said were political reasons.

Read more: Venezuelan Democracy Advocate María Corina Machado Receives 2025 Nobel Peace Prize

Machado won 92% of the vote in the opposition’s 2023 primary elections, but she was disqualified by the government’s comptroller, which barred her from holding public office for 15 years. That has not deterred her from her political activism, however. In 2024, she received both the Sakharov Prize and the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize for her opposition to authoritarianism. 

“I am just part of a huge movement. I’m humbled, I’m grateful and I’m honoured,” Machado said in an interview with the Nobel Institute after receiving the award.

“I accept this is as a recognition to our people, to the millions of Venezuelans that are anonymous and are risking everything they have for freedom, justice and peace and I’m absolutely convinced that we will achieve it.”

Economics

Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt were awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics for explaining how innovation creates economic growth, advances society and generates a higher quality of life for people across the world. 

The laureates demonstrated that “over the last two centuries, for the first time in history, the world has seen sustained economic growth,” the Nobel Committee explained, noting that prior to this era of ongoing development, “stagnation was the norm throughout most of human history.”

Half of the award was given to Mokyr, from Northwestern University, Illinois, “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress.” Using history, he showed how new innovations succeed each other and propel modern advancements.  

The other half of the award was split between Aghion, of Collège de France, INSEAD and the London School of Economics, and Howitt, of Brown University in Rhode Island. They used mathematical models to explain a concept called “creative destruction,” which, like Mokyr’s work, shows how new products in the market outcompete old products, creating conflict but also driving innovation. 

“The laureates’ work shows that economic growth cannot be taken for granted. We must uphold the mechanisms that underly creative destruction, so that we do not fall back into stagnation,” said John Hassler, Chair of the Committee for the prize.

Mokyr woke up early to check who had won the prize on his computer. “I had a whole list of people that I thought were going to win, and I wasn’t on it,” he said in an interview with the Nobel Institute after winning. He saw congratulatory emails and missed calls from Sweden on his phone, and “the suspicion started to ripen.”

“My future is going to involve more economics, and less golf, than I had anticipated,” Howitt said to the Institute, after reminiscing about his time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with fellow laureate and long-standing friend Aghion.

Physics

John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis, all professors at American universities, were awarded for groundbreaking work in quantum mechanics that the chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics said paved the way for devices like the cellphone and camera.

The committee cited a series of experiments the physicists conducted in 1984 and 1985 that proved two principles of quantum mechanics on a scale visible to the human eye: “quantum mechanical tunnelling” and “energy quantisation in an electric circuit.”

Quantum tunneling describes the phenomenon of particles penetrating a barrier when they don’t appear to have enough energy to do so. The committee noted that while an everyday object like a ball—which is macroscopic in scale—will bounce back every time it hits a wall, this tunneling is sometimes observed with single particles in their “microscopic world.”

Clarke, Devoret, and Martinis, the committee said, were able to demonstrate the phenomenon on a macroscopic scale in their experiments, building a superconducting electrical system that “could tunnel from one state to another, as if it were passing straight through a wall.”

The physicists also showed that the system was quantized, or only gained or lost energy in specific amounts, the committee said—demonstrating another principle macroscopically.

Clarke, who is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley’s graduate school, said in an interview following the announcement of the prize that he, Devoret and Martinis recognized the significance of their work demonstrating quantum tunneling “to an extent” at the time, but “didn’t have the remotest idea” how continually significant it would prove to be over the ensuing 40 years.

“I’m still stunned,” he said of his feelings following the announcement, noting that he was “so happy and so pleased” to win along with Devoret and Martinis. “I could not imagine accepting the prize without the two of them,” he said.

Chemistry 

Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi were awarded the prize for developing molecular structures that the committee said have been used by researchers to “harvest water from desert air, extract pollutants from water, capture carbon dioxide and store hydrogen.” 

In experiments that began in the 1980s and developed over the ensuing 15 years, the scientists developed frameworks using metals and organic molecules that contained cavities large enough for gases and other materials to flow through. 

One commercial application of their work, according to a summary posted by the committee, is containing the toxic gases needed to produce semiconductors using such “metal–organic frameworks,” which can contain more gas than traditional materials. 

Kitagawa teaches in Japan at Kyoto University, Robinson is a professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and Yaghi teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

In an interview after the award’s announcement, Yaghi acknowledged that his life and work in chemistry have been “quite a journey,” noting that he was born into a family of refugees and grew up in a “humble home” in which a dozen people shared a single room with cattle they raised. “Science is the greatest equalizing force in the world,” he said.

“Science allows us to talk to each other, and I don’t think you can stop that. I think that that’s something that will continue to be important, and enlightened societies will encourage it,” he said during a later news conference hosted by Berkeley.

Physiology or Medicine

Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi won for work the committee said was “fundamental” to understanding how the immune system functions.

“They discovered how the immune system is kept in check,” the committee said. “The laureates identified the immune system’s security guards, regulatory T cells, which prevent immune cells from attacking our own body.”

There are more than 200 clinical trials in process that are informed by their research, according to the committee.

Sakaguchi is an expert in immunology at the University of Osaka, Brunkow is a senior program manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, and Ramsdell is a co-founder of Sonoma Biotherapeutics, a biotechnology company based in San Francisco.

Brunkow said she wasn’t expecting to win. “My phone rang, and I saw a number from Sweden and thought, well that’s just spam of some sort, so I disabled the phone and went back to sleep,” she said in an interview following the award’s announcement. 

Ramsdell, meanwhile, learned that he had won the prize only belatedly. He couldn’t immediately be reached by the committee because he was “living his best life and was off the grid on a preplanned hiking trip” at the time the prize was announced, according to his company; it was his wife that ultimately informed him, Ramsdell told the New York Times, after she regained cell phone service and received a wave of text messages.

Literature 

The Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, known for his dystopian novels and lengthy sentences, was awarded for what the committee described as “his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

“Krasznahorkai is a great epic writer in the Central European tradition that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is characterised by absurdism and grotesque excess. But there are more strings to his bow, and he also looks to the East in adopting a more contemplative, finely calibrated tone,” the committee said. 

Krasznahorkai, who was born in southeast Hungary in 1954, was hailed as a “master of the apocalypse” by Susan Sontag. His latest novel to appear in English comprises a single sentence, including just one period in its 400 pages.

“I thank, first of all, the readers. I wish for everybody to get back the ability to use their fantasy, because without fantasy it’s an absolute different life,” he said in an interview after the announcement. “To read books gives us more power to survive these very difficult times on Earth.”