The forward-thinking organization
making the prize possible 

Foundation

The Frontiers Research Foundation, a not-for profit organization based in Lausanne, Switzerland, was established in 2006 by Henry and Kamila Markram with the mission of accelerating scientific solutions for living healthy lives on a healthy planet.

fronteirs


The first initiative was launched in 2007 and is called Frontiers. The objective was to create an open scientific platform and an open access publisher to provide free access to as many researchers as possible.

Since then, Frontiers has become one of the largest and most cited scientific publishers in the world, with more than 100,000 published articles and accessed free of charge by millions of researchers every month.

2007
FYM


The second initiative was launched in 2013 and is called Young Minds. The objective was to create a free science magazine edited by kids and for kids. Since then, Young Minds has educated tens of millions of children and their families around the world about science.

In addition, it has introduced children to the peer-review process, where they can interact with and challenge the world's leading scientists, such as Nobel Prize winners. 

2013
FPP


The third initiative was launched in 2022 and is called the Planet Prize. The objective was to create an annual competition that funds and accelerates scientific research to find solutions for the planet to remain within the safe operating space within any one or more of the 9 planetary boundaries defined by Johan Rockström.

Since then, the Frontiers Planet Prize has engaged leading universities and research institutions, national academies of science, a prestigious Jury of 100 led by Johan Rockström, the International Council of Science and several leading sustainability partners from around the world.

2023

Founders

About
Kamila

Co-founder

  • “I want all children to live on a healthy planet. I hope the Frontiers Planet Prize becomes more than just another prize, but a catalyst for rapid change.“ - Kamila Markram

    Kamila co-founded Frontiers Research Foundation and Frontiers Media with the goal of accelerating science by making published science articles open to enable healthy lives on a healthy planet. She obtained an MSc in Psychology from the Technical University Berlin and completed her Masters thesis at the Max-Planck Institute for Brain Research, Germany in 2003.

    She gained her PhD degree in Neuroscience at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology (EPFL), and received an EPFL award for her thesis work on autism.

    During her postdoctoral studies at the EPFL she formulated the Intense World Theory of Autism with Henry Markram. The theory turned previous theories upside down by showing that experimental evidence points most strongly to the idea that autistic symptoms are a byproduct of a super-charged brain that perceives, absorbs, learns and feels too much – causing autistic people to withdraw from an overly intense and painful world. The theory resonated beyond the research community, featuring in popular science magazines and documentaries and published as a book in 2018.

    Kamila is the CEO of Frontiers, which was founded with the vision to make science open with all research papers openly and widely available to the public.

    Kamila has presented the case for how Open Science can accelerate science and maximize return on investment in science at various venues, including at the National Academy of Sciences, Science Foo Camp, TEDx, the Web Summit and the Frontiers Forum held annually in Switzerland. During the pandemic the Frontiers Forum went online, where tens of thousands of scientists, business leaders and policy-makers attended the presentations, and over a million viewed each presentation on YouTube.

    Kamila has built up Frontiers to become the 3rd most cited of the 20 largest academic publishers in the world with over 100,000 editors from around the world. She has been named a L’HEBDO Forum 100 personality, was a finalist for the 2016 Ernst and Young Entrepreneur Award and the 2017 EU Prize for Women Innovators.

About
Henry

Co-founder

  • “The Frontiers Planet Prize is a response to the state of emergency of the planet’s ecosystem. We need scientific solutions fast and the best way to get them is for the global brain to focus on the problem.” - Henry Markram

    Henry Markram is a professor of neuroscience at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). He founded the EPFL’s Brain Mind Institute, the Swiss Blue Brain Project, and the Europe’s Human Brain Project.

    In Lausanne, he runs a biology lab where the team of experimentalists study the design of the brain. Discoveries made include: how synapses learn by judging how well they are timed to transmit information in the brain, the Intense World Theory of Autism together with Kamila Markram; and as co-discoverer, a new paradigm for computing, called liquid computing. In Geneva, he runs the Blue Brain Project, which is building digital twins of the brain to allow simulation experiments on virtual brains running on supercomputers.

    Henry and his team have published over 260 research articles, and he is one of the highest cited neuroscientists in the world. He and his team also used the Blue Brain’s AI technology to extract knowledge from hundreds of thousands of articles and found the main reason why some people get a more severe form of COVID-19 is because of deficiencies in metabolizing glucose.

    He has received numerous awards and honours, including the Bell Labs Claude Shannon Visionary Award and the International Hebb Award. More recently, he founded INAIT, an AI company aimed at developing a new generation AI that is based on the actual architecture and operating system of the brain.