JFF Dillon Brout Receives Breakthrough New Horizons in Physics Prize

Recognized for advances in cosmic microwave background and supernovae cosmology

Dillon Brout, Assistant Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Boston University and a Hariri Institute Junior Faculty Fellow, has been named a recipient of the 2026 New Horizons in Physics Prize  — one of the most coveted honors for early-career scientists and part of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation awards, widely known as the “Oscars of Science.”

The $100,000 prize recognizes early-career researchers who have already made significant contributions to their fields. Brout was recognized for advances in cosmic microwave background and supernovae cosmology and shares the award with J. Colin Hill, Mathew Madhavacheril, Maria Vincenzi, Dan Scolnic, and W. L. Kimmy Wu.

An observational cosmologist, Brout is at the forefront of efforts to understand the universe’s expansion and underlying structure. His research combines massive astronomical datasets with advanced machine learning and statistical methods to uncover new insights about dark energy and cosmic evolution.

Brout and his collaborators were recognized for achieving powerful new results using the two most important tools for measuring the universe’s expansion and composition: the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation left over from the Big Bang, and light from exploding stars (Type Ia supernovae) used as distance markers across the cosmos.

Brout was also recognized with Scolnic and Vincenzi for the Pantheon+ analysis, which built the largest and most precise supernova datasets to map the expansion of the universe. His paper based on Pantheon+ received a 2025 IOP Publishing Top Cited Paper Award, presented to papers in the top 1 percent of the most-cited articles published in the IOP’s journals. The work has delivered tight constraints on dark energy and refined measurements of the universe’s rate of expansion. By linking observations of exploding stars with signals from the early universe, this landmark research is helping to define a new era of precision cosmology and deepen our understanding of the cosmos.

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation was co-founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki, and is now in its 14th year. This year’s prizes total $18.75 million, bringing the cumulative amount awarded over the foundation’s history to more than $340 million.