Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology

Eppendorf and Science/AAAS established this international prize in 2002. It acknowledges the increasing importance of Neurobiology in advancing our understanding of how the brain and nervous system function. It is awarded annually to one young scientist for the most outstanding neurobiological research based on experimental methods of molecular, cellular, systems, or organismic biology conducted by him/her during the past three years.

About this prize

The Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology celebrates its 25th anniversary this year.

Prize money: 25,000 USD

Additional benefits:

The prize winner‘s essay is published in Science and on Science Online
The prize is announced and presented at a ceremony in conjunction with the Annual
Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Eppendorf provides full support to attend this event
Besides the grand prize winner the jury may appoint up to three finalists each year

Application deadline: June 15, 2027

Eppendorf & Science Prize Winner 2026

Congratulations to Gioele La Manno, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at the Brain Mind Institute of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, on winning the 2026 Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology for his pioneering work of whole-brain 3D lipid mapping, providing an atlas of a hidden layer of neural diversity.

A pioneering 3D map of lipids across the adult mouse brain has earned Gioele La Manno, Ph.D., of EPFL, the 2026 Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology. His work reveals a previously overlooked layer of neural diversity. One in which distinct lipid patterns help define brain regions, cellular identities, and physiological states.

He built the first high-resolution 3D atlas of brain lipids, which reveals a mind-blowing complexity. The brain organizes into five hundred dynamic territories, each with a different lipid mix. This discovery opens a new way to study how lipids shape brain function and disease.

Meet the finalists

2026 Finalist Zuri Sullivan, Ph.D.

Zuri Sullivan is a Member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Whitehead Career Development Professor of Biology at MIT, and HHMI Hanna H. Gray Faculty Fellow. She began studying Mycobacterium tuberculosis at Harvard, then moved to Durban, South Africa as a Fulbright Scholar to study human immunity to HIV and tuberculosis. At Yale, in Ruslan Medzhitov’s laboratory, she investigated how immunity regulates intestinal physiology. As an HHMI Hanna H. Gray Fellow in Catherine Dulac’s laboratory at Harvard, she studied how the brain responds to immune threats.

2026 Finalist Alexander Bates, Ph.D.

Alexander Bates earned his Ph.D. with Gregory Jefferis at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, University of Cambridge, where he helped assemble and annotate the first connectome of an adult fly brain, FAFB/FlyWire, analyzed its olfactory system, and built open-source software for synaptic-resolution neuroanatomy now used across the field.

General prize information

About the prize

The Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology acknowledges the increasing importance of this research in advancing our understanding of how the brain and nervous system function - a quest that seems destined for dramatic expansion in the coming decades....