Harutyunyan was chosen for his paper “Gaussian Curvature as an Identifier of Shell Rigidity" which appeared in Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis (2017).

Established in 2001, the Emil Artin Junior Prize in Mathematics carries a cash award of US$1,000 and is presented every year to a student or former student of an Armenian educational institution under the age of thirty-five for outstanding contributions to algebra, geometry, topology, and number theory—the fields in which Emil Artin made major  contributions.

The prize committee consisted of A. Basmajian, Y. Movsisyan, and V. Pambuccian.