Gioele La Manno Receives the 2026 Boehringer Ingelheim–FENS Research Award
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The Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS), in partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim, has announced that Gioele La Manno is the recipient of the prestigious Boehringer Ingelheim–FENS Research Award 2026.
The award, worth CHF 25,000, recognises outstanding contributions to neuroscience and will be officially presented at the FENS Forum 2026, taking place from 6–10 July 2026 in Barcelona, where La Manno will deliver the award lecture.
Currently Assistant Professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Gioele La Manno leads the Laboratory of Brain Development and Biological Data Science. His research focuses on understanding how the brain forms during embryonic development, combining cutting-edge biology with computational approaches.
La Manno developed and applied techniques to read the molecular identity of individual cells in the embryonic brain, producing the first detailed portrait of how human and mouse midbrain neurons are born. He then invented RNA velocity, a method that reveals the direction in which cells are changing, and assembled the first comprehensive molecular map of the embryonic mouse brain from its earliest stages to birth. Along the way, his group created new methods to map where cells sit in tissues and how their states evolve over time.
More recently, his lab developed a new analysis aproach leading to the discovey that the fats composing cell membranes are not uniform across the brain but form hundreds of distinct spatial patterns, a discovery that opened an unexpected new dimension of brain organization.
➡️ Source: Press Release | 📸 ©EPFL