This September 9, the Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Scientists announced the Finalists for the 2025 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists. Three of the 18 will go on to be named Laureates and receive a $250,000 prize at a Gala ceremony in New York City on October 7, 2025.
The Young Scientists Awards recognize scientific advances made by researchers in the United States across the following disciplines: Life Sciences, Chemical Sciences, and Physical Sciences & Engineering, a press release from Blavatnik said.
Former Director of the National Science Foundation and current President of the Global Learning Council in Switzerland Dr. Subra Suresh, will announce the three 2025 Laureates at the awards ceremony to be held at the American Museum of Natural History.
An independent jury of expert scientists selected this year’s Finalists from a pool of 310 nominees representing 161 academic and research institutions across 42 U.S. states.
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Each Laureate will receive an unrestricted award of $250,000, the world’s largest unrestricted science prize, available for early-career scientists in the U.S. The remaining 15 Finalists will each receive $15,000.
The two Indian origin 2025 Finalists are Yogesh Surendranath, PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Inorganic & Solid-State Chemistry), in the Chemical Sciences category; and Prateek Mittal, PhD, Princeton University (Computer Science) in the Physical Sciences & Engineering category.
Surendranath is recognized for pioneering molecular-level control of catalyst surfaces and electrostatic environments to revolutionize chemical reactions, enabling sustainable fuel production and significant reductions in carbon emissions.
Mittal is recognized for pioneering work powering the security and privacy of the internet, generating over 2.5 billion cryptographic certificates and securing more than 350 million websites.
Surendranath is the Donner Professor of Science at MIT. A B.S. in Chemistra and a B.A. in Physics from the University of Virginia, he received his Ph.D. from MIT, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Berkeley.
According to his Research Summary on Blavatnikawards.org, Surendranath’s pioneering work gives a new understanding of how electric fields at catalyst surfaces control key chemical reactions. His breakthroughs advance sustainable chemistry by reducing carbon emissions and unlocking new routes for converting abundant resources like carbon dioxide and methane into valuable products.
According to Blavatnik, “Surendranath’s research reshapes fundamental catalysis science and drives technologies essential for a low-carbon future, making it highly deserving of recognition.”
Mittal is a Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. A graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, he has a Master of Science and a Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
According to Blavatnik, in our increasingly digitized world, the privacy and security of the information we transmit online is of paramount importance, and “Research being led by computer scientist Prateek Mittal, PhD, seeks to ensure that our data is safeguarded against those who would try and take it for their own benefit.”
By discovering and fixing security vulnerabilities in well-known protocols, “Mittal has already transformed the methods being used to secure our internet data – leading to hundreds of millions of websites, both private and government-run alike, being secured,” the award-giving organization said.
Internationally recognized by the scientific community, the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists, has at the close of 2025, recognized more than 500 scientists from 120 international research institutions and awarded prizes totaling nearly $20 million.
To date, Blavatnik Awards honorees have founded 50 companies after receiving the award, six of which are publicly traded and collectively valued at over $10 billion.