UChicago's 2026 Pritzker Prize for AI in Science goes to Persson, Collins and Barzilay

What the prize recognizes

The prize was presented at the third University of Chicago and Caltech Conference on AI+Science. According to the university, it honors outstanding academic contributions that jointly advance artificial intelligence and the natural sciences or engineering. It was established in 2024 and is open to academic scientists and research teams. Each award carries $50,000.

Eric Horvitz, Chief Scientific Officer at Microsoft and a member of the selection committee, said: “The Prize recognizes exceptional work that harnesses AI to advance discovery across science and engineering.” Prize chair Rebecca Willett, the Worah Family Professor of Statistics and Computer Science in the Wallman Society of Fellows, said that “AI and science are reshaping each other.”

Kristin Persson and the Materials Project

Persson, who works in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, was recognized for pioneering data-driven materials design. Her methods combine first-principles computational methods with machine learning. The university also credited her for founding and leading The Materials Project, described as a transformative global open-science resource.

According to the announcement, Persson has more than 350 peer-reviewed publications and over 82,000 citations. She founded the Materials Project in 2011 as an open-access platform for computed materials data, analysis and machine learning. The university says it is now the world's most widely used materials data resource, with more than 800,000 registered users. It delivers terabytes of data globally each day, and approximately 3,000 new researchers join every week.

Persson described the role of AI in her work this way: “AI is not simply making an existing calculation fast. It is allowing us to ask scientific questions that were previously computationally inaccessible.”

A first team award for antibiotic discovery

Regina Barzilay, of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and James J. Collins, of MIT's Department of Biomedical Engineering, were honored together for their collaboration applying deep learning to antibiotic discovery and drug design. The university called it one of the most consequential demonstrations of AI's potential to address a global health crisis.

The pair have used deep learning to discover and design structurally novel antibiotic compounds that are effective against some of the world's most dangerous drug-resistant pathogens. Their Antibiotics-AI Project at MIT, run in partnership with the nonprofit Phare Bio, aims to develop seven new classes of antibiotics targeting seven of the world's deadliest bacterial pathogens. The announcement notes that antimicrobial resistance is projected to cause 10 million deaths annually by 2050.

Collins said AI has allowed researchers “to search for entirely new classes of compounds, understand how they work much faster, and even design new antibiotics from scratch.”

What it signals

The two awards point to different strengths of AI in research: shared infrastructure that serves a large community of materials scientists, and targeted discovery work aimed at a specific medical threat. The university says the winners' bodies of work advance their fields, AI in scientific research, and society. Naming a team for the first time also suggests the prize is recognizing collaborative projects that link AI expertise with a scientific domain, in line with Willett's remark that progress requires researchers to understand both fields well enough to push the boundaries of each.