Three $1 million prizes for scientific research will be shared among nine scientists who contributed to astrophysics, neuroscience and nanoscience.
Bestowed every two years since 2008, Kavli Prizes are named for Norway-born Fred Kavli, a philanthropist who died last November, according to The Associated Press.
The prizes, which will be officially handed out in Oslo, Norway, in September, come from a collaboration between California's Kavli Foundation and the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research.
Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Andrei Linde of Stanford University and Alexei Starobinsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow will be awarded with the prize in astrophysics. The trio have won the prestigious award for their work developing the theory of inflation, the idea that the universe expanded rapidly immediately after the Big Bang.
Taking honors in neuroscience, Brenda Milner of McGill University in Montreal, John O'Keefe of University College London and Marcus Raichle of Washington University in St. Louis, Miss., are being recognized for their respective studies of memory, mental skills and more.
"Milner and O'Keefe linked specific regions of the brain to particular kinds of memory and mental skills," the AP reported. "Raichle designed techniques to visualize the workings of the human brain and discovered key patterns in brain activity."
Thomas Ebbesen of the University of Strasbourg in France, Stefan Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, Germany, and Sir John Pendry of Imperial College London share the prize for nanoscience for their study of very tiny structures such as a bacterium.
Benefiting fields including physics, chemistry and biomedical sciences, their work has allowed scientists to capture images of tiny structures in natural lighting.
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