It is a great honor to receive the 2014 Nuclear Fusion Prize, here at the 25th IAEA Fusion Energy Conference. On behalf of everyone involved in this work, I would like to thank the IAEA, the Nuclear Fusion journal team, the IOP, and specifically Mitsuru Kikuchi, for their support of this important award. I would also like to acknowledge the many important contributions made by the other ten papers nominated for this prize.Our paper investigates the physics of the H-mode pedestal in tokamaks, specifically the development of a predictive understanding of the pedestal structure based on electromagnetic instabilities which constrain it, and the testing of the resulting theoretical model (EPED) against detailed observations on multiple devices. In addition to making pedestal predictions for existing devices, the paper also presents predictions for ITER, including methods for optimizing its pedestal height and fusion performance.What made this work possible, and indeed a pleasure to be involved with, was an extensive set of collaborations, including theory-experiment, multi-institutional, and international collaborations. Many of these collaborations have gone on for over a decade, and have been fostered in part by the ITPA Pedestal Group. The eight authors of this paper, from five institutions, all made important contributions. Rich Groebner, Tom Osborne and Tony Leonard carried out dedicated experiments and data analysis on the DIII-D tokamak, testing the EPED model over a very wide range of parameters. Jerry Hughes led dedicated experiments on Alcator C-Mod which tested the model at high magnetic field and pedestal pressure. Marc Beurskens carried out experiments and data analysis on the JET tokamak, testing the model at large scale. Xueqiao Xu conducted two-fluid studies of diamagnetic stabilization, which enabled a more accurate treatment of this important effect. Finally, Howard Wilson and I have been working together for many years to develop analytic formalism and numerical techniques which enable efficient quantitative study of peeling-ballooning modes. More broadly, I would like to thank the full DIII-D, C-Mod and JET teams, the LLNL and General Atomics Theory groups, and the York Plasma Institute. In addition, I would like to thank the US DOE Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, EURATOM, and the UK EPSRC for supporting this research.On a more personal note, I would like to thank my mentors over the years, including Nat Fisch, Greg Hammett, Ron Waltz, Vincent Chan, and Tony Taylor, and numerous colleagues who provided insight related to this work, including Lang Lao, Alan Turnbull, Ming Chu, Bob Miller, Rip Perkins, John Greene, Keith Burrell, John Ferron, Mickey Wade, Wayne Solomon, George McKee, Zheng Yan, Andrea Garofalo, Raffi Nazikian, Jack Connor, Jim Hastie, Chris Hegna, Samuli Saarelma, Guido Huijsmans, Alberto Loarte, Yutaka Kamada, Naoyuki Oyama, Hajime Urano, Nobuyuki Aiba, Andrew Kirk, David Dickinson, Lorne Horton, Costanza Maggi, Wolfgang Suttrop, P.A. Schneider, Rajesh Maingi, Amanda Hubbard, Ahmed Diallo, John Walk, and Matthew Leyland.Recently, the model developed in this paper has been used to discover a new regime of operation, the Super H-Mode, and to shed light on mechanisms for suppressing Edge Localized Modes. I hope that the model will continue to be useful, both as a tool for predicting and optimizing pedestal and fusion performance, and as a platform on which the fusion community continues to build our understanding of the complex physics of the edge barrier region, which plays such an important role in overall confinement and stability.