Seven scientists in three fields, including astronomy, life sciences and medicine, and mathematics received awards at the Shaw Prize Awards Ceremony held in Hong Kong on Wednesday night.

The ceremony took place at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center, with Donald Tsang, Chief Executive of the HKSAR, People’s Republic of China, as the guest of honor to officiate. Run Run Shaw, the patron of the awards, was there to present prizes to the winners.

Enrico Costa, Director of Research at the Institute of Space Astrophysics and Cosmic Physics (Rome) of the National Institute of Astrophysics, Italy, and Gerald Fishman, Senior Astrophysicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, shared the Shaw Prize in Astronomy. Their research demonstrated the cosmological origin of gamma ray bursts.

The Life Sciences and Medicine award was given to three scientists, including Jules Hoffmann of the University of Strasbourg, Ruslan Medzhitov of Yale University, and Bruce Beutler from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, for their discovery of the molecular mechanism in innate immunity, which is considered the frontline of defense against pathogens.

The prize for Mathematics was shared by Demetrios Christodoulou of ETH Zurich and Richard Hamilton of Columbia University, in recognition of their contributions to nonlinear partial differential equations in Lorentzian and Riemannian geometry and their applications to general relativity and topology.

The Shaw Prize was founded in November in 2002 by Run Run Shaw, in order to reward scientists who have made recent breakthroughs in academic and scientific study or applications and who have made a significant difference in human life through their work. The prize consists of one million US dollars for each of the three awards, and prizewinners are appraised regardless of their race, nationality or religious faith. This year was the eighth time awards have been presented.