In 2006, the New York City-based Vilcek Foundation launched a prize program to honor US-based biomedical scientists who immigrated to the United States and made extraordinary contributions to their fields (1). Established in 2000 by Jan and Marica Vilcek, the Vilcek Foundation has been supported by Jan Vilcek’s donation of royalties received from the New York University School of Medicine for his contribution to the development of the antiinflammatory drug infliximab. The Vilcek Foundation’s prize program was born out of the Vilceks’ desire to recognize the contributions of immigrants to science and arts in the United States. It is also a celebration and emblem of immigration’s role in securing the primacy of the United States in science and arts on the world stage. There is no other major prize that specifically recognizes immigrant contributions to science in the United States. Angelika Amon. Image courtesy of Samara Vise (Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Cambridge, MA). Since the establishment of the prize program in 2006, 15 scientists have received the Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science. The Vilcek Foundation also recognizes outstanding young foreign-born scientists through the establishment of Prizes for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science; these prizes are open to candidates who are not more than 38 y old at the time of consideration. To date, 22 scientists have received Prizes for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science (in parallel, the Vilcek Foundation also awards an equal number of prizes in the arts to outstanding foreign-born artists active in the United States) (2). The recipient of the 2019 Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science is Angelika Amon, an Austrian-born molecular and cell biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Angelika Amon’s passion for biology began early, when a picture of dividing plant cells viewed through a microscope sparked an enduring fascination with … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: pnair{at}nas.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1