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The 2026 Nobel recognitions concluded Monday with Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford receiving the Nobel Memorial Prize in economic sciences. The laureates, two American professors, were honored for developing “new macroeconomic models that have significantly improved our ability to implement effective stabilisation policy.”
The rest of the Nobel Prizes, for physiology or medicine, physics, chemistry, and literature, and peace were announced last week.
Winners will receive a diploma, a medal, and 12 million Swedish kroner—the equivalent of roughly $1.2 million—during the award ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo in December.
Here’s what to know about the winners and why their work is being recognized.
Physiology or medicine
Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine on Monday for their pioneering discoveries in optogenetics, a method that uses light to determine how cells operate in the brain or even to exert control over those processes.
“Optogenetics provides opportunities for mapping the brain in a way that we could once only dream of,” said Per Svenningsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for physiology or medicine.
Hegemann is a professor of biophysics at Humboldt University in Berlin. Nagel teaches plant physiology at the University of Wurzburg in Germany. And Deisseroth is a professor of behavioral sciences at Stanford University.
The laureates’ use of optogenetics will allow researchers to “discover exactly which of the nerve cells in a complicated bundle control different brain functions,” such as those related to pain, social behavior, thirst and hunger, and reward and attention, the committee wrote.
Nagel said in an interview with the Nobel Institute that he was “very surprised” upon receiving the news and that he thought it was “too early to get this prize in medicine optogenetics,” given his belief that other medical discoveries have benefited a greater number of people. Hegemann said to the institute that he was “overwhelmed” upon receiving the news.
Deisseroth, who has similarly said he was “quite surprised” to receive the honor, told Stanford Medicine that he “couldn’t be happier,” noting that “the trio that the committee picked spans the progression from the early algal explorations all the way to advanced neuroscience experiments.”
“So this prize really captures the full journey of discovery,” he said.
Physics
Francis Halzen was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for his work studying neutrinos, extremely small, ghostly particles that are all around us but rarely interact with other matter.
Neutrinos carry no electrical charge, allowing them to travel great distances and pass through most matter without losing energy or changing direction. This quality makes the particles potent messengers for information about distant cosmic phenomena. But it also makes them exceedingly hard to detect and study.
Halzen, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, came up with the idea of using ice at the South Pole to track the elusive particles. His work, the Nobel committees said, has been “fundamental” for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which is equipped with thousands of light sensors embedded in the transparent glacial ice that enable researchers to observe and capture the faint flashes of light produced in the rare instances when neutrinos do interact with other particles. Not long after the observatory was completed, IceCube detected the first high-energy neutrinos from far-away galaxies.
“Francis Halzen has led an international team of researchers and engineers who have provided us with a fantastic instrument. His tenacity and scientific vision has paved the way for a new kind of astronomy,” Mark Pearce, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in a press release.
Halzen was at a science festival in Bergamo, Italy, working on a proposal when he received the news that he had won the prize. “As I joked in one of the meetings, I hope it helps to get it funded,” he said in an interview with the Nobel Institute.
Halzen explained how his team at IceCube discovered that blue light can travel for hundreds of meters through the ice at the South Pole, which allowed them to observe neutrinos’ interactions. “This is ancient snow that fell on Antarctica 50,000 years ago. It’s ultra pure, and that’s why it’s so transparent,” he explained.
The tracking of neutrinos, Halzen added, may provide insight even in the study of black holes.
“This is obviously a place from which light doesn’t escape,” he said of the cosmic vacuums. But, he noted, the very first time IceCube researchers identified a celestial neutrino source, tracing the particles back to an active galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center, “is already an example of looking into the very close regions of the black hole, where presumably only neutrinos escape.”
Chemistry
The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai on Wednesday for finding the solution to a mystery about the chirality, or “handedness,” of molecules that had confounded scientists for decades.
Many molecules possess two variants that are mirror images of each other, similar to a right and a left hand, But one of those variants heavily predominates when the molecule is found in nature, and is the only variant of the molecule that is found in living beings. And, despite their similarity, each of the variants produces a different effect, meaning that in pharmaceuticals, for instance, only one of the mirror-image versions of the molecule can contribute to the desired result of a drug.
Scientists were long mystified by how to create a particular mirror image, finding that the two variants were produced in equal proportions when they did experiments that formed these “handed” molecules.
It was Kagan, who teaches at the Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, and Kenso, who teaches at the Tokyo University of Science, who figured out the process for producing a desired variant, demonstrating how homochirality—or same handedness—occurs in molecules.
“Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have provided a solution to a chemical mystery that is over a century old: how homochirality can emerge spontaneously. The chemical reactions they have developed are spectacular,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a press release.
No human had manufactured a chemical reaction that created only one of two possible mirror images of a molecule until Soai succeeded in doing so in 2003. That milestone came after an earlier breakthrough made by Kagan in 1986, when he developed a way of manipulating chemical reactions that enabled him to produce one molecular variant in a notably greater proportion.
Soai and Kagan’s discoveries have contributed to the development of countless drugs and medicines.
“There’s a huge number of drug molecules that are used by incorporating what they have developed,” Peter Somfai, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in an interview. “The left handed version of the drug can have one effect, and the right handed can have one effect.”
“I think many international people in international countries, researchers are attracted to that phenomenon,” Soai said of the reaction he used to produce molecular homochirality in a brief interview with the Nobel Institute. “And so I’m very pleased to know that they are examining our reaction.”
Literature
The Canadian poet, essayist, and translator Anne Carson received the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for what the Nobel committees described as “her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”
Carson is known for her experimental writing that blends prose, poetry, and translation. Perhaps her most celebrated work, Autobiography of Red, is a prosimetrum—a combination of prose and poetry—that reimagines the myth of the Greek hero Herakles slaying the winged red monster Geryon into a teenage love story. Other seminal works of Carson’s include Eros the Bittersweet (1986), The Beauty of the Husband (2001), and Nox (2010).
Carson has won many accolades throughout her writing career, including a MacArthur Fellowship, Griffin Poetry Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award. She became the first woman to win the TS Eliot prize in 2001 for her “fictional essay” The Beauty of the Husband, a collection of narrative verse inspired by the poet John Keats’s conception that “beauty is truth, truth beauty” that tells the story of a marriage.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered his congratulations to Carson on Thursday.
“With wit, imagination, and a style entirely her own, Canadian poet Anne Carson has reimagined the classics,” Carney wrote in a post on X. “She has brought ancient stories to new audiences and transformed the way we think about literature.”
In an interview with the Nobel Institute, Carson described her writing as “inadvertent.”
“I always try to do something else,” she said, speaking from her seaside home in Reykjavik, Iceland, while eating crackers and drinking tea next to her husband.
When asked if she had thought about what the prize means to her, Carson responded, “No, I haven’t. We’re just thinking of ways to give the money away. We have a friend who needs a house. And we always give a lot to Doctors Without Borders.”
Ingrid Carlberg, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, delivered the news to Carson over the phone before it became public. Calberg said that when she called, Carson told her she was “listening to the wind.”
Peace
Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, the South African jurist who received the peace prize on Friday, has served in several roles throughout her career during which she acted as a “legal pioneer, confronting deep structural discrimination, segregation and exclusion,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee wrote.
Pillay has served on the High Court of South Africa and on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. She was previously the United Nations human rights commissioner. And today, she serves as a judge on the International Court of Justice in a case where Myanmar is being accused of genocide.
“Pillay’s commitment to universal legal principles and her firm moral compass are constants in a long career,” the committee wrote. “In historic international court cases, she has shown that legal measures can help prevent acts of war and violence … Her independence, expertise and steadfastness have made her one of the most respected international jurists of our time.”
Read More: Navanethem ‘Navi’ Pillay Wins the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize
Pillay was also the chair of the U.N. International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which concluded last September that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
Israel dismissed the report at the time, calling it “scandalous” and “fake.”
The country’s Foreign Ministry expressed strong opposition to Pillay receiving the prize on Friday.
“If there were an award for lies, hatred, and blood libels, Navi Pillay wouldn’t just be a contender. She’d be a frontrunner,” the ministry wrote in a post on X, adding, “Awarding Pillay the Nobel Peace Prize isn’t a recognition of justice. It’s the grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice.”
Other world leaders and international organizations have congratulated Pillay for receiving the honor and praised her work.
“Justice Pillay’s crowning as winner of the Nobel Prize allows us to celebrate the progressive contributions she has made to strengthen peace, uphold human dignity and bring hope in South Africa and to peoples globally,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said in a statement. “She has served humanity with principle and the belief that the world can and should be a better place.”
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called the decision to award the prize to Pillay “a tribute to all those working to uphold & defend international law, the rule of law & human rights, and secure peace, justice & human dignity.”
In her various roles, Guterres wrote in a post on X, Pillay “has shown that the force of law must prevail over the law of force and that defending human rights is the surest safeguard against injustice.”
Upon receiving her prize, Pillay said she was still “reeling with surprise” and dedicated her award to “all of the survivors of international crimes as well as to practitioners and defenders of international justice whose compassion and courage continue to ensure that impunity will not be allowed to reign.”
“This award strengthens my conviction that we must stand together in defense of the rule of law, in defense of independent courts, and an international legal order based on principle rather than selectivity,” Pillay said.
Pillay also made a joke about President Donald Trump, who has long coveted the peace prize, on Friday, referencing his open campaigning for the prize and last year’s winner, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, gifting her award to him.
“If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump,” Pillay said, prompting laughter from the audience at the Nuremberg Court in Germany.
Machado, who was awarded the 2025 prize to honor her work fighting against dictatorship and promoting democracy in her country for nearly 25 years, gave Trump her award after the U.S. ousted former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in a military raid in January.
The committee, however, issued a statement in the wake of the gesture declaring that laureates cannot share or transfer prizes.
“The decision is final and applies for all time,” the committee wrote.
Economic sciences
Hall and Woodford received the economics sciences award for “demonstrating how economic models could be reconstructed to revitalise stabilization policy.”
Rather than assessing economic stabilization based on traditional Keynesian models, linking between macroeconomic variables, Hall and Woodford’s models look instead towards a microeconomic foundation, including the impacts that individual households and businesses have on the wider economy, said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences alongside its announcement.
Hall is a professor of economics at Stanford University and Woodford is a professor of political economy at Columbia University. Woodford said he was “elated” to receive the award. “It’s a tremendous honor, it’s a surprise, but I’m feeling very good about it,” he told the Nobel prize committee in a phone call.
“The laureates’ work has provided us with a stable theoretical foundation for the models that are now used by central banks and governments around the world. With them, we are better equipped to deal with shocks in the economy, such as energy crises or sudden changes in how much households consume,” said John Hassler, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences.
Woodford said the pair’s work stressed “the understanding of the people who are in the markets and making decisions about spending.”
“And so, creating a framework that allows governments to talk to the public about what they’re doing, I think is also important. And that was one of the key goals of trying to develop an analytical framework was not simply to use it on people, but to also talk to people about why the things that are being done are being done,” he added.
This year has seen a number of external shocks hit global economics, no more so than the ongoing U.S. war with Iran, which has severely disrupted global energy markets.
