During the opening session of the 2014 IAEA Fusion Energy Conference in St Petersburg, Russian Federation, I was pleased to present the 2013 and 2014 Nuclear Fusion journal prizes. The IAEA's monthly journal, Nuclear Fusion, has been publishing preeminent research in controlled thermonuclear fusion for over 50 years. In 2006, we inaugurated an annual journal prize to recognise outstanding contributions. This prize is presented to the lead author of the paper judged by the journal's Board of Editors to have made the greatest scientific contribution in the two years following its publication.The 2013 prize was awarded to Dennis Whyte, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for the 2010 paper:'I-mode: an H-mode energy confinement regime with L-mode particle transport in Alcator C-Mod' [1]This ground breaking paper, presenting results from Alcator C-Mod, enhances our understanding of the formation of energy transport barriers and temperature pedestals, without particle barriers, through the I-mode regime. The discovery of a stationary ELM-free improved confinement regime with no impurity accumulation in a metallic high field tokamak, like ITER, has implications that will stimulate much future research.The 2014 prize was awarded to Philip Snyder, General Atomics, USA, for the 2011 paper:'A first-principles predictive model of the pedestal height and width: development, testing and ITER optimization with the EPED model' [2].Pedestal height will have a dramatic impact on overall fusion performance in next-step devices. This exceptional paper presents a compelling model for the edge pedestal width and height based on coupling peeling-ballooning theory for stability and kinetic ballooning transport theory. Comparison is made to experimental observations across a range of devices and convincing agreement is demonstrated. This model, therefore, has the potential to significantly focus the predictions of performance in future devices.I congratulate the prize winners and their co-authors and thank the Nuclear Fusion Board of Editors for their deliberations.References[1] Whyte D.G. et al 2010 Nucl. Fusion50 105005[2] Snyder P. et al 2011 Nucl. Fusion51 103016