Dan Scolnic Receives Breakthrough New Horizons in Physics Prize
Dan Scolnic is an associate professor of Physics and the co-director of the SPACE Initiative at Duke. (Photo courtesy of Scolnic)
Dan Scolnic, associate professor of Physics, has been named a recipient of the 2026 New Horizons in Physics Prize, awarded by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. He shares the prize with five collaborators — Dillon Brout, J. Colin Hill, Mathew Madhavacheril, Maria Vincenzi, and W. L. Kimmy Wu — for their advances in cosmic microwave background and supernova cosmology.
The New Horizons in Physics Prize is awarded annually by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation — the organization behind the $3 million Breakthrough Prizes, popularly known as the “Oscars of Science” — to early-career researchers who have already made significant contributions to their fields.
Scolnic joined Duke’s faculty in 2019 and is one of the nation’s leading scholars in cosmology. His research focuses on charting the expansion of the universe by measuring the light emitted from Type Ia supernovae — exploding stars that serve as precise cosmic distance markers. He is the co-director of the SPACE Initiative at Duke, and a member of the Duke Cosmology Group.
The prize recognizes, in part, Scolnic’s role in building and analyzing some of the largest modern supernova datasets. Most notably, he and his collaborators produced Pantheon+, now the most cited supernova analysis in cosmology, which has delivered tight new constraints on dark energy and the rate at which the universe is expanding.
Two of Scolnic’s closest collaborators on the prize-winning team have longstanding personal and professional ties to him. Maria Vincenzi, now a professor at the University of Oxford, conducted her postdoctoral research with Scolnic at Duke. Dillon Brout, now a professor at Boston University, first worked with Scolnic when Brout was an undergraduate and Scolnic was a graduate student — a collaboration that has spanned the arc of both their careers.
“It is particularly meaningful to be receiving it alongside Maria and Dillon,” said Scolnic. “This award recognizes our work using supernovae to measure the expansion history of the universe.”
The Breakthrough Prize Foundation was co-founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki, and is now in its 14th year. This year’s prizes total $18.75 million, bringing the cumulative amount awarded over the foundation’s history to more than $340 million.
Scolnic is also Duke’s presidential fellow for the 2025-2026 academic year, a program established by President Vincent Price to give a faculty member firsthand experience with university administration.
