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Lemelson–MIT Prize

award

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionDec 18, 2025
Entity authorityQ551250
Source-derived summary

The Lemelson–MIT Program awards several prizes yearly to inventors in the United States. The largest is the Lemelson–MIT Prize which was endowed in 1994 by Jerome H. Lemelson, funded by the Lemelson Foundation, and is administered through the School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The winner receives $500,000, making it the largest cash prize for invention in the U.S.

The $100,000 Lemelson–MIT Award for Global Innovation (previously named the Award for Sustainability) was last awarded in 2013. The Award for Global Innovation replaced the $100,000 Lemelson–MIT Lifetime Achievement Award, which was awarded from 1995 to 2006. The Lifetime Achievement Award recognized outstanding individuals whose pioneering spirit and inventiveness throughout their careers improved society and inspired others.

The Lemelson–MIT Program also awards invention prizes for graduate students, called the Lemelson–MIT Student Prize.

List of Lemelson–MIT Prize winners

Source:

2019

Cody Friesen (Lemelson–MIT Prize)

2018

Luis von Ahn (Lemelson–MIT Prize)

2017

Feng Zhang (Lemelson–MIT Prize)

2016

Ramesh Raskar (Lemelson–MIT Prize)

2015

Jay Whitacre (Lemelson–MIT Prize)

2014

Sangeeta N. Bhatia (Lemelson–MIT Prize)

2013

Angela Belcher (Lemelson–MIT Prize)

Rebecca Richards-Kortum and Maria Oden (Lemelson–MIT Award for Global Innovation)

2012

Stephen Quake (Lemelson–MIT Prize) (Scientist, Inventor, Entrepreneur, Professor of Biophysics and Genomics at Stanford University)

Ashok Gadgil (Lemelson–MIT Award for Global Innovation)

2011

John A. Rogers (Lemelson–MIT Prize) (Professor, Physical Chemist, and Materials Scientist at Northwestern University)

Elizabeth Hausler (Lemelson–MIT Award for Sustainability)

2010

Carolyn Bertozzi (Lemelson–MIT Prize)

BP Agrawal (Lemelson–MIT Award for Sustainability)

2009

Chad Mirkin (Lemelson–MIT Prize), George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Medicine, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, and Director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology and Center for Nanofabrication and Molecular Self-Assembly at Northwestern University

Joel Selanikio (Lemelson–MIT Award for Sustainability), CEO and co-founder, Magpi, and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Georgetown University Hospital

2008

Joseph DeSimone (Lemelson–MIT Prize)

Martin Fisher (Lemelson–MIT Award for Sustainability)

2007

Timothy M. Swager (Lemelson–MIT Prize)

Lee Lynd (Lemelson–MIT Award for Sustainability)

2006

James Fergason (Lemelson–MIT Prize) for his liquid crystal display innovations.

Sidney Pestka (Lemelson–MIT Lifetime Achievement Award)

2005

Robert Dennard (Lemelson–MIT Lifetime Achievement Award)

2004

Nick Holonyak Jr. (Lemelson–MIT Prize) (John Bardeen Endowed Chair Emeritus in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Edith M. Flanigen (Lemelson–MIT Lifetime Achievement Award)

2003

Leroy Hood (Lemelson–MIT Prize) for his invention of four devices that have helped unlock the human genome, including the automated DNA sequencer.

William P. Murphy Jr.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Lemelson–MIT Prize” is award. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Lemelson, Prize and award, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1994, 2013, 1995, 2006—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Lemelson, Prize and award is the immediate research focus.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 18, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q551250. The Library of Congress control number is no2006122867. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1994, 2013, 1995 and 2006.

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This entry incorporates text from Lemelson–MIT Prize” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.