In 2008, Rachel Andres became the first female recipient of the Charles Bronfman Prize for her work with the Solar Cooker Project. As a freelance consultant for Jewish World Watch, she was hired to helm a new initiative to help find a solution to decrease the rape of women living in refugee camps in Chad—the necessity of collecting firewood often led women away from refugee camps where the majority of the rapes occurred. While researching, Andres found the KoZon Foundation, which supplies solar cookers made of cardboard and foil to help rural African communities. Andres found this to be a suitable solution and put together a large-scale national education campaign in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. To date, the project has well surpassed its initial $50,000 fundraising goal.

“The dream of starting a daily newspaper in New York is one that I have maintained for decades. I’ve never gotten over the thrill of the scoop and the satisfaction of using the pen in the battle of ideas, the fight for one’s ideals,” says Seth Lipsky. Paying homage to the former New York Sun, Lipsky brought the paper back from the dead 52 years later. As the cofounder and editor-in-chief of the Sun, he is able to voice a different point of view from other New York papers. With past journalistic experience at the Wall Street Journal and The Forward, an English-language national Jewish newspaper, going back to writing would make Lipsky “happy as a clam,” but he would “prefer helping others become stars rather than trying to become a star.”

Eric Maskin was the recipient of the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences. As both the Albert O. Hirschman Professor of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study and a Visiting Lecturer in Economics at Princeton University, Maskin values the connections he makes with his students. His early penchant for mathematics attracted Maskin to economics and led him to propose the theory of mechanism design, which allowed economists to recognized markets that work well and which do not. It is this theory that led Maskin to receive the Nobel honor. Although he hasn’t decided how to spend the prize money, he does know a large portion will be going towards Camphill Special School, a school for disabled children in Pennsylvania.