Professor Michel Mayor, winner of the 2015 Kyoto Prize

Michel Mayor was one of the laureates of the 2015 Kyoto Prize. The other laureates were chemist Toyoki Kunitake and choreographer John Neumeier.

Michel Mayor, who is Professor Emeritus at Geneva University in Switzerland and has spent sabbatical semesters with ESO in Chile, was honoured for “answering a fundamental age-old question of astronomy regarding the existence of exoplanets by discovering 51 Pegasi b, the first one orbiting a Sun-like star… and opening an entirely new field of research.”