WASHINGTON (AP) —The founder of virtual reality firm Oculus and singer Rosanne Cash and are among those who were honored with American Ingenuity Awards at the Smithsonian Institution, along with eight other scientists and scholars for their groundbreaking work.
Smithsonian magazine awarded the prizes on October 16, 2014, to 10 innovators in art, science and culture. The magazine polls Smithsonian museum directors and curators to find innovators impacting their fields. Washingtonian magazine has described the event as the “Golden Globes of Intellect.”
Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey received the youth award. He was 16 when he began inventing the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset for consumers. Facebook acquired Irvine, California-based Oculus in March for $2 billion.
Cash received the performing arts award for her 2014 album The River & The Thread that was inspired by a series of trips to the Deep South, not to mention her 11 No. 1 country singles.
Additional Awards
- Technology Award: Huge Herr for developing a highly functional bionic leg at MIT Media Lab for a dancer wounded in the Boston Marathon bombing.
- Physical Sciences Award: Francis Halzen, University of Wisconsin-Madison physicist who created a giant particle detector to study cosmic neutrinos under the South Pole.
- Natural Sciences Award: Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for discoveries about how memories form.
- Social Progress Award: Kimberly Bryant, founder of Black Girls Code, the first group devoted to teaching web coding skills to girls of color.
- Education Award: Max Kenner, founder of the Bard Prison Initiative to educate prison inmates.
- Visual Arts Award: Janet Echelman, who created an interactive artwork over Vancouver using light from viewers’ smartphones.
- Historical Scholarship Award: Bill Morrison, a documentary filmmaker for his film “The Great Flood.”
American Ingenuity Awards: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ingenuity
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