List of Swiss Nobel laureates



The Nobel Prize is a set of annual international awards bestowed on "those who conferred the greatest benefit on humankind" in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Peace and Economic Sciences, instituted by Alfred Nobel's last will, which specified that a part of his fortune be used to create the prizes. Each laureate (recipient) receives a gold medal, a diploma and a sum of money, which is decided annually by the Nobel Foundation. They are widely recognized as one of the most prestigious honours awarded in the aforementioned fields.

First instituted in 1901, the Nobel Prize has been awarded to a total of 965 individuals and 27 organizations. Among them, 28 Swiss nationals have been honored with the Nobel Prize. Additionally, four laureates acquired Swiss citizenship after the award: Wolfgang Pauli and Jack Steinberger were naturalized, while Kofi Annan was granted honorary citizenship from Geneva.

Ten organizations headquartered in Switzerland have received the Nobel Prize for Peace. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has been awarded twice, and the International Committee of the Red Cross three times. Four of these organizations were also founded in Switzerland, and they all have their headquarters in Geneva, a city hosting more than 40 international organizations and 750 non-governmental organizations.

The first Nobel Prize for Peace, awarded in 1901, went to the Swiss humanitarian Henry Dunant. The latest Swiss laureates are Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2019. The 28 prizes are distributed as follows: nine for medicine, seven for chemistry, seven for physics, three for peace, and two for literature. No Swiss national has yet received a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Switzerland is among the countries with the highest number of Nobel laureates, both in total and per capita. Several factors have been suggested as possible explanation, including large public funding for research, the presence of highly ranked universities such as ETH Zürich and EPFL, and the neutrality of Switzerland in the two World Wars, which attracted scientists from abroad. The Nobel Prize has also been often recognized as being biased towards Western countries. According to Nobel laureate Werner Arber, the large number of awards to Swiss nationals is "likely a statistical anomaly".