2026 Award Winner: Dr. Martin Pačesa

Assistant Professor and Group Leader at University of Zurich, Institute of Pharmacology, Switzerland.

Martin Pačesa, born 1993, receives the € 20.000,-- award for his research on AI-guided de novo design of functional protein binders. The jury members were excited by his outstanding research and acknowledged the importance of his contributions to this field and the impact of the tools that he had developed for the research community.

Martin Pačesa: “It still feels a bit unreal to receive the 2026 Eppendorf Award for Young European Investigators. This recognition reflects our work on deep learning-based protein design, particularly BindCraft, which enables accurate and accessible design of protein binders. Much of biology can be framed as a binder-target problem, and the ability to design these interactions on demand opens new possibilities in biological research. I am grateful to my colleagues at EPFL, especially Prof. Bruno Correia, Lennart Nickel, and Christian Schellhaas, as well as to my wife, my new lab at the University of Zurich, and support from the ERC. There’s still a lot to figure out, but it feels like we’re moving towards a point where protein design can become genuinely routine for the everyday biologist.”

The official prize ceremony took place on July 16, 2026 at the Advanced Training Centre of the EMBL in Heidelberg. The laudation honoring Martin Pačesa‘s achievements was written by Award Jury Member Prof. Ben Lehner, Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK and CRG, Barcelona, Spain