Fred Kavli

Fred Kavli, a physicist who left Norway for California as a young man and made millions manufacturing sensors for appliances, automobiles and aircraft, then late in life began donating much of his fortune to science, establishing a major prize he intended to rival the Nobel. The Kavli Foundation, which Mr. Kavli started in 2000, has given more than $200 million to establish 17 scientific research institutes at universities around the world for work in astrophysics, neuroscience, nanoscience and theoretical physics. In 2008, the first Kavli Prizes were awarded, with recipients in each of three categories splitting $1 million. The prizes are awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo in September every other year. The Kavli Foundation has supported a wide range of work. Among the seven winners of the Kavli Prizes in 2012 were, in nanoscience, Mildred S. Dresselhaus, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose research helped usher in the age of nanotechnology; in neuroscience, Cornelia Isabella Bargmann of Rockefeller University, who studies the neural circuits of Caenorhabditis elegans, a worm with only 300 nerve cells, to learn how the brain processes information from the environment; and, in astrophysics, scientists who discovered the Kuiper belt, a cloudy disk of ice and rock near Neptune.