Elon Musk is twice as important as Edward Snowden or Jane Goodall. The proof? He just won two World Technology Network (WTN) awards – one in the energy category for his work with Solar City and Tesla Motors, and one in space for his SpaceX endeavors. They, and a bunch of other folks, including LeVar Burton (who isn’t really blind, you know), only won one award.
The official press release follows:
World Technology Network Award Winners
Announcing the WINNERS of the 2014 WORLD TECHNOLOGY AWARDS presented by the World Technology Network (WTN) in association with Fortune and TIME
NEW YORK, Nov. 17, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — On Friday night, Nov. 14th, to wrap up two days of thought-provoking speakers that included a live, interactive webcast interview with fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden, this year’s World Technology Award winners were revealed.
The Winners were announced for the prestigious 2014 World Technology Awards in a gala ceremony held at the conclusion of the 2014 World Technology Summit & Awards, presented by the World Technology Network (WTN) in association with Fortune and TIME on November 13th/14th at the TIME Conference Center in New York City. The winners were joined by WTN members — Individual “Fellows” and Corporate Members from over 40 countries — as well as 2014 Awards Finalists and others.
2014 World Technology Award Winners:
THE ARTS
Yael Kanarek -Artist (New York, NY, USA)
BIOTECHNOLOGY (i)
Xiaowei Zhuang – Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Professor of Physics, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA, USA)
BIOTECHNOLOGY (c)
BGI -(Shenzhen, China)
COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY (i)
Holger Claussen – Department Head, Small Cells Research, Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent (Dublin, Ireland)
COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY (c)
Waze – (Mountain View, CA, USA)
DESIGN
Nick Woodman – Founder, CEO, Chairman, GoPro (San Mateo, CA, USA)
EDUCATION
LeVar Burton – Co-Founder/Curator-in-Chief, RRKidz& Reading Rainbow; actor – “Star Trek”, “Roots”; Director (Los Angeles, CA, USA)
ENERGY (i)
Elon Musk – Chairman, SolarCity; Co-Founder, CEO, Product Architect, Tesla Motors (Palo Alto, CA, USA)
ENERGY (c)
NewCO2Fuels – (Rehovot, Israel)
ENTERTAINMENT
Palmer Luckey – Founder, Oculus V – now part of Facebook; inventor, Oculus Rift VR headset (Irvine, CA, USA)
ENVIRONMENT (i)
Michael Biddle – Founder & CEO, MBA Polymers (Headquarters: Worksop, Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom)
ENVIRONMENT (c)
Skipping Rocks Lab – (London, United Kingdom)
ETHICS
Wendell Wallach – Scholar, Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, Yale University (New Haven, CT, USA)
FINANCE (i)
Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell – Co-Founder, Y Combinator (Mountain View, CA, USA)
FINANCE (C)
500 Startups – (Headquarters: Mountain View, CA, USA)
HEALTH & MEDICINE (i)
David Frakes – Associate Professor, School of Biological & Health Systems Engineering, Arizona State University (Tempe, AZ)
HEALTH & MEDICINE (c)
Nyxoah
(Mont-Saint-Guibert, Belgium) – IT-HARDWARE (i)
Rodney Brooks – Founder, CTO, Chairman, Rethink Robotics; Co-Founder, former, CTO, iRobot (Boston, MA, USA)
IT-HARDWARE (c)
Aldebaran Robotics – (Headquarters: Paris, France)
IT-SOFTWARE (i)
Vitalik Buterin – Co-creator & inventor, Ethereum; Co-Founder, Bitcoin magazine (Toronto, Canada)
IT-SOFTWARE (c)
Red Hat – (New York, NY, USA)
LAW
Victor Mayer-Schonberger – Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford (Oxford, United Kingdom)
MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS
Krista Canfield – Head of Mobile Product PR, LinkedIn (Mountain View, CA, USA)
MATERIALS (i)
Zhong Lin Wang – Director, Nanscience Research Group, School of Materials Science & Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA, USA)
MATERIALS (c)
Parx Plastics – (Rotterdam, Netherlands)
MEDIA & JOURNALISM
Walter Isaacson – President/CEO, Aspen Institute; former CEO, CNN; author, “Steve Jobs“, “The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution” (Washington, DC, USA)
POLICY
Jane Goodall – Founder, Jane Goodall Institute; UN Messenger of Peace; Primatologist (Vienna, VA, USA and Gombe National Park, Tanzani
SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Blair Glencorse – Founder, Accountability Lab (Washington, DC, USA; Liberia; Nepal)
SPACE (I)
Elon Musk – Founder/CEO/CTO, SpaceX
SPACE (C)
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) – (Bangalore, India)
The World Technology Awards have been presented by the WTN since 2000, as a way to honor those in 20 different categories doing “the innovative work of the greatest likely long-term significance.”
Past individual winners have included Elon Musk, Daan Roosegaarde, Doris Sung, Perry Hoberman, Ron Nabarro, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, Mark Zuckerberg, Craig Venter, Jonathan Ive, Esther Dyson, Gordon Moore, Larry Page/Sergey Brin, Al Gore, and Angela Belcher, with corporate Winners including Space-X, Apple, Tesla Motors, Thin Film Electronics, Betaworks, and many others… often well before they are on the public radar.
The WTN is a curated membership community comprised of the world’s most innovative individuals and organizations in science, technology, and related fields. The WTN and its members – those creating the 21st century – are focused on exploring what is imminent, possible, and important in and around emerging technologies.
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