2026 Prize Winner Gioele La Manno, Ph.D.

Tenure-track Assistant Professor at EPFL Brain Mind Institute of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland

Gioele La Manno leads the Laboratory of Brain Development and Biological Data Science. He studied biotechnology at the University of Palermo, Italy, and earned his Ph.D. at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm in 2018. He established his group at EPFL directly after his Ph.D. as an ELISIR scholar and became Assistant Professor in 2023. He led pioneering work to map the developing nervous system, devising computational methods that turn single-cell snapshots into predictions of cell development. His prize-winning research produced the first threedimensional lipid atlas of the mouse brain, revealing a layer of brain diversity beyond what gene expression captures. He now investigates how this lipid diversity shapes brain development and disease.

Essay: “Fats that think”

Lipids form the membranes of brain cells and the myelin around nerve fibres, but their diversity has remained much harder to map than that of genes. Gioele La Manno and his colleagues developed computational methods to combine millions of imaging mass spectra into the first three-dimensional lipid atlas of the adult mouse brain. The atlas reveals 539 distinct territories, or lipizones, each with its own lipid signature. Some follow familiar anatomical boundaries; others expose biochemical differences that conventional maps miss. These patterns cannot be read directly from gene activity: the transcriptome accounts for only about half of the explainable lipid variation. Regions connected by long-range nerve projections also share lipid identities more often than expected. The map changes during pregnancy, showing that lipid organization is dynamic. Together, these findings reveal a layer of brain diversity that has been largely overlooked. By making it possible to study where lipids are located and how their distributions change, La Manno’s work provides a foundation for testing how lipid composition contributes to cell identity, brain function and disease.