A Clay Research Award is made to James Newton (Oxford) and Jack Thorne (Cambridge) in recognition of their remarkable proof of the existence of the symmetric power functorial lift for Hilbert modular forms.

The conjecture that the symmetric powers of automorphic representations associated to classical and Hilbert modular forms should themselves be automorphic is one of the fundamental conjectures of the programme introduced by Langlands in the late 1960’s, indeed it was cited by Langlands as a prototype test case for his conjectures. Building on earlier work of Clozel and Thorne, Newton and Thorne have written a series of ingenious papers proving this result using a very detailed application of modularity lifting results to the associated Galois representations. The proof marks a milestone in work on the Langlands programme.