Two UC Berkeley Faculty Members Win New Horizons Prizes
Mathematician Yunqing Tang and physicist Benjamin Safdi were honored for their early career contributions.
Two young UC Berkeley faculty members, Yunqing Tang of mathematics and Benjamin Safdi of physics, are among the winners of this year’s New Horizons Prizes, awarded annually by the Breakthrough Foundation to early-career scientists.
The announcement was made Saturday, April 18, at a gala awards ceremony for the Breakthrough Prizes in Santa Monica, where six prizes of $3 million each were awarded. Additionally, 15 early-career physicists and mathematicians were recognized, including Tang and Safdi, each of whom shared six $100,000 New Horizons Prizes. Three awards were also given for women mathematicians who have recently completed PhDs.
Tang, an associate professor of mathematics, shared the New Horizons math prize with Vesselin Dimitrov of Caltech “for work in Diophantine geometry, including the proof of the Atkin-Swinnerton-Dyer unbounded denominators conjecture and new irrationality results for special values of Dirichlet L-series.” The two, along with collaborator Frank Calegari of the University of Chicago, published their groundbreaking proof last year, for which all three were awarded the 2026 Frank Nelson Cole Prize for Number Theory.
A graduate of Peking University, Tang holds a 2016 PhD from Harvard University. After stints at various research institutions, including Caltech, she joined the Berkeley math faculty in 2022. Tang has also been awarded the SASTRA Ramanujan prize, a Sloan Research Fellowship and the AWM Microsoft Research prize.
Safdi, an associate professor of physics and member of the Leinweber Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Berkeley, was the sole winner of the New Horizons physics prize “for proposing new ways to seek axion-like particles with laboratory experiments and astronomical observations.” Axions are one of the most popular candidates for the universe’s mysterious dark matter, and Safdo has investigated various ways of discovering them. In 2024, he proposed an astronomical way to detect them by looking for gamma rays from the core collapse of a large star into a neutron star. In such an event, he argued, axions should be produced in copious quantities and, upon escaping, be transformed into high-energy gamma rays by the star’s intense magnetic field.
He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder and his PhD from Princeton University in 2014. After appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Safdi moved to Berkeley Lab in 2020 and joined the Berkeley physics faculty in 2021. He received the Department of Energy Early Career Award in 2018 and the IUPAP C11 Young Scientist Prize in Particles and Fields in 2020.