Awards & honours

The work and excellence of EMBL researchers have been recognised with multiple awards and honours during the past year.

Rolf Apweiler, director of EMBL-EBI, has been elected a Member of the Academia Europaea, in recognition of his status as a leading expert in his field. Academia Europea promotes European research, advises governments and international organisations in scientific matters, and furthers interdisciplinary and international research.

Ewan Birney, EMBL Deputy Director General and Joint Director of EMBL-EBI, has received an honorary doctorate in bioinformatics from the University of Tartu for his remarkable work in the development of bioinformatics and genomics, as well as his contributions to the formation and promotion of Estonian researchers.

Miki Ebisuya, Group Leader at EMBL Barcelona, Cornelius Gross, Interim Head of EMBL Rome, and Nassos Typas, Group Leader and Senior Scientist at EMBL Heidelberg, have been elected to EMBO Membership. It is a lifelong honour that allows elected scientists to serve on EMBO’s council and committees, evaluate applications for EMBO funding, and act as mentors to young scientists.

Anne Ephrussi, Director of EMBL’s International Centre for Advanced Training and Senior Scientist, has been elected as one of the 150 new members of the US National Academy of Science, for her work on the compartmentalisation and regulation of RNA molecules and localised determinants in development.

Kai Fenzl, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Steimentz group, won the Otto-Schmeil Prize for his joint work with Matilde Bertolini from Stanford University on the formation of protein complexes in human cells. This biannual prize awards young scientists for outstanding work in biological and medical research. 

Eileen Furlong, Head of the Genome Biology Unit and Senior Scientist, has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, for her contributions to developmental genomics and research on genome regulation during embryonic development. The Royal Society aims to recognise, support and promote science and its benefit to humanity. She has also  received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize 2022 from the German Research Foundation (DFG) in recognition of her exceptional research.  

Wim Hagen, Senior Engineer in Electron Microscopy in the Mattei Team at EMBL Heidelberg, and Ardan Patwardhan, Team Leader at EMBL-EBI, won the Royal Microscopical Society Scientific Achievement Award. This award recognises their contributions to the field of electron microscopy.

Edith Heard, EMBL Director General, has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Cambridge and been elected as a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, in recognition of her academic excellence. The former distinction recognises her work in epigenetics and developmental biology. In addition, she has been nominated Ordinary Academician by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a supranational academy of sciences whose mission is to honour pure science, ensure its freedom, and encourage research for the progress of science. She has also been awarded with the Richard Benz medal for her contributions to Heidelberg as a centre of science and research.

Matthias Hentze, EMBL Director and Senior Scientist, has been awarded the Centenary Award by the Biochemical Society, for his excellent contributions in the field of biosciences and commitment to building, supporting, and nurturing talent.

Antonia Lock, Scientific Database Curator at EMBL-EBI, has won the Excellence in Biocuration Award in the Advance Career Award category. This award recognises biocurators who have been involved in a biocuration relevant field for 7 to 15 years. In her career, Antonia developed standards to describe metadata for genome-wide HTP data sets, mapped controlled vocabularies to ontologies, and done ground-work curation for a genetic disorder with drugs currently in clinical trial.

Julia Mahamid, Group Leader and Senior Scientist, has received the Oswalt Foundation’s Frankfurter Biophysics Prize for her contribution to advances in electron tomographic and imaging of cells.

John Marioni, Visiting Research Group Leader at EMBL-EBI, has been elected as a Fellow of the  UK Academy of Medical Sciences, for his significant work in biomedical science. The Academy’s main goal is to help in the creation of an open and progressive research sector to improve health.

André Mateus, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Savitski Team  and the Typas Group, has won the Karl Freundenberg Prize for his work on characterising the proteomic landscape of Escherichia coli. This Prize acknowledges the work of young scientists in the field of natural sciences in the German region of Baden-Württemberg.

Diana Ordoñez, Head of the Flow Cytometry Core Facility, has been elected a SRL Emerging Leader in Flow Cytometry, by the International Society for Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC) for the period 2022-2025. This nomination recognises her leadership potential and technical expertise.

Nicoletta Petridou, Group Leader, has received the GfE Hilde Mangold Early Career Award 2022 from the German Society of Developmental Biologists (GfE). 

Janet Thornton, Group Leader and Senior Scientist, has been selected as the inaugural winner of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) Journal Open Science Award, for her lifelong commitment to open science, the key role she played in the development of the ELIXIR infrastructure for the life sciences, and her work on developing many freely available databases and tools.