The 35th annual awards ceremony for the King Faisal International Prize was held in the Prince Sultan Grand Hall of the Al-Faisaliah Center in Riyadh this evening. Dr. Abdullah Al-Saleh Al-Othaimeen, the Secretary General of the King Faisal International Prize, announced the winners of the award, while Crown Prince Salman handed out the prizes and offered congratulations.

The competition included four categories this year.

The Prize for Service to Islam was awarded to Sheikh Raed Salah Mahajneh for his leadership and humanitarian work in the occupied Palestinian territories as Chairman of the Islamic Movement in Palestine from 1996-2001.

The Prize for Arabic Language and Literature, which focused this year on the creation of Arabic dictionaries, was awarded to the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo for its many contributions over the past eighty years, including the publication of a large collection of specialized dictionaries linking contemporary Arabic with its past.

The Prize for Medicine was awarded to Jeffrey Michael Friedman of Rockefeller University in New York and Douglas Leonard Coleman of the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine for their research into the genetics of obesity – specifically the identification and characterization of the leptin pathway.

The Prize for Science, which focused this year on physics, was awarded to Paul B. Corkum of the University of Ottawa and Ferenc Krausz of Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich for their pioneering work on the motion of electrons.

Created in 1979, the King Faisal International Prize includes a $200,000 cash reward. A total of 229 individuals and organizations from 40 different countries have received the Prize.