‘Vigil’ by acclaimed author George Saunders kicks off the new Campus Reading Program
May 13, 2026
Northwestern University has announced the winners of the 2026 Nemmers Prizes in medical science, music composition, Earth sciences, economics and mathematics.
The biennial prizes recognize top scholars for their lasting contributions to new knowledge, outstanding achievements and the development of significant new modes of analysis.
This year’s recipients are Jean-Laurent Casanova for medical science, John Corigliano for music composition, Maureen Raymo for Earth sciences, Whitney K. Newey for economics, and Andrei Okounkov for mathematics. Each award comes with a cash prize, and the recipients will interact with Northwestern faculty and students through lectures, conferences, seminars and other activities.
The Nemmers Prizes are named for the family of Erwin Nemmers, a former faculty member at the Kellogg School of Management from 1957 to 1986. Erwin Nemmers joined forces with his brother, Frederic Nemmers, to make a significant contribution to Northwestern. Their gifts, totaling $14 million, were designated to establish four endowed professorships at Kellogg and the Nemmers Prizes, which carry some of the largest monetary stipends in each field.
This year’s recipients
Dr. Jean-Laurent Casanova, Medical Science
Announced in March by the Feinberg School of Medicine, Dr. Jean-Laurent Casanova was awarded the Mechthild Esser Nemmers Prize in Medical Science, a prize of $350,000, for his discovery of the human genetic and immunological determinants of infectious diseases.
He is the Levy Family Professor at Rockefeller University, pediatrician at the Necker Hospital for Sick Children and Imagine Institute in Paris, and investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Casanova discovered the rare and common genetic causes of more than 20 severe infections, including severe COVID-19 pneumonia, severe influenza pneumonia, herpes simplex virus encephalitis, tuberculosis and others. His research seeks to identify the genetic causes and immunological mechanisms of infectious diseases, paving the way for strengthening host defense against infection.
An international member of the National Academy of Sciences, Casanova’s work has been recognized with the Novo Nordisk Prize in 2025, the Stanley J. Korsmeyer Award in 2016 and the Robert Koch Award in 2014, among others.
He will meet with students and faculty at Feinberg School of Medicine and deliver a public lecture in September.
John Corigliano, Music Composition
The Bienen School of Music announced in April that it has awarded American composer John Corigliano the Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition, a prize of $150,000, for his significant contributions to every corner of the repertoire, encompassing chamber music, concerti, operas, wind ensemble and orchestral works, and music for film.
Corigliano’s music has been commissioned, performed, and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and chamber musicians in the world. His Symphony No. 1, commissioned while he was a composer-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, has been performed worldwide by more than 300 orchestras and recorded three times. His operas include “The Ghosts of Versailles,” commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera in honor of the company’s centennial.
His honors include the Pulitzer Prize, the Grawemeyer Award, an Academy Award for Best Original Score and five Grammy Awards. He serves on the composition faculty at the Juilliard School of Music.
Corigliano's first Northwestern residency will take place in May of 2027 with a second residency planned during the 2027-2028 academic year.
Whitney K. Newey, Economics
Whitney K. Newey was awarded the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics, a prize of $300,000, in recognition of a body of work that has shaped the field of semiparametric econometrics, guided both econometricians and empirical researchers over several decades, and helped lay the foundations for modern machine learning-based inference.
Newey, the Ford Professor of Economics, Emeritus at MIT, has been a leading figure in econometric theory for more than four decades, shaping both research and training in the field. He has done pathbreaking work on variance estimation, nonparametric simultaneous equations, consumer surplus estimation with general heterogeneity, and debiased machine learning. His 1994 Econometrica paper gave general formulae for the asymptotic variance of semiparametric estimators, especially for those depending on nonparametric regressions with an approximately linear representation, series estimators for these with asymptotic theory, and showed orthogonality of any nonparametric components that are profiled out of extremum estimators.
He is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society.
Newey will visit Northwestern during the 2026-27 academic year to engage in programming with Economics faculty and students.
Andrei Okounkov, Mathematics
Andrei Okounkov, Samuel Eilenberg Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University, was awarded the Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize in Mathematics, a prize of $300,000, for his body of work of exceptional depth, breadth and sustained impact on modern mathematics, spanning representation theory, algebraic geometry, probability and mathematical physics.
Descriptions of Okounkov’s research can be found on his website.
Okounkov's honors include the Fields Medal in 2006, the European Mathematical Society Prize and the Compositio Mathematica Prize.
He is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Okounkov will visit Northwestern during the 2026-27 academic year to engage in programming with Mathematics faculty and students.
Maureen Raymo, Earth Sciences
Maureen Raymo was awarded the Nemmers Prize in Earth Sciences, a prize of $300,000, in recognition of her pioneering development of hypotheses that explain climate change across Earth’s history and her educational leadership in the Earth system sciences.
Raymo is the G. Unger Vetlesen Professor of Earth and Climate Science in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and Co-Founding Dean Emerita of the Columbia Climate School.
A member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Raymo has leveraged knowledge of the inner workings of Earth’s solid, liquid and gaseous spheres to advance our understanding of how Earth’s systems interact, change and ultimately drive climatic change on geologic time scales. She is best known for developing the Uplift-Weathering Hypothesis, which borrows from and links various Earth system science sub-disciplines, including science that underpins our understanding of plate tectonics, mountain building, atmospheric science, ocean biogeochemistry, chemical weathering, the carbon cycle and climate change.
Raymo will visit Northwestern during the 2026-27 academic year to engage in programming with faculty and students in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences.
