At the occasion of our 350th anniversary, Merck is sponsoring the Future Insight Prize to stimulate innovative solutions to solve some of humanities greatest problems and to realize the dreams for a better tomorrow in the areas of health, nutrition and energy. The Future Insight Prize will put the vision for ambitious dream products of global importance for humankind into the world and will trigger curiosity and creativity worldwide on how to make this vision a reality. We intend to give out up to EUR 1,000,000 annually for the next 35 years to incentivize people whose work has enabled significant progress towards making this vision a reality via discovering new ground-breaking science or via development of enabling technologies.

The Future Insight prize puts the vision for ambitious dream products of global importance for humankind into the world and triggers curiosity and creativity on how to make these visions a reality.

The prize will be awarded annually from 2019 onwards to honor outstanding achievements in science & technology towards a ground‐breaking innovation important for the future of humanity in the areas:

• Health - Pandemic Protection (2019)
• Health - Multi Drug Resistance (2020)
• Nutrition - Food Generator (2021)
• Energy - CO2 Conversion (2022)

Selection Process

• A jury comprising experts from all over the world will identify suitable candidates for the Future Insight prize
• Additionally, proposals for Future Insight Prize candidates can be sent to the jury (no self-nominations)
• Amongst all of these candidates, the jury will select the top individuals whom are invited to submit a formal application for the prize
• The jury will evaluate these applications and select the winner of the Future Insight prize
• The winner will be publicly announced and present their research at the Future Insight conference

Future Insight Prize's selection criteria

• Has the recipient’s work provided important breakthroughs to enable a realization of the dream product?
• Is the recipient’s work of utmost scientific quality recognized by top peer review journals?
• Will the recipient be able to make good use of the prize money to advance research in this area?

Future Insight Prize Topic 2022: CO2 conversion

2022: CO2-to-Fuel Converter – generating fuel by photocatalytic conversion of atmospheric CO2 (category: Energy). This category is open to proposals here until December 31, 2021. 

Award Ceremony 

The 2021 award ceremony took place during the Future InsightTM days. The event featured the Future InsightTM prize  for outstanding research towards the dream product "Food Generation", the Spinoff Prize and the Johann Anton Merck Award. The awarding for the 2022 Future Insight Prize will be given during the Curious Future Insight Conference. Learn more here. 

More information

For more information, please visit the Merck's website here or send an email to futureinsightprize@merckgroup.com.