The Brain Prize 2027: A €1.3 Million Lundbeck Foundation Award for Outstanding Neuroscience, With Nominations Closing 1 September 2026

The Brain Prize 2027: A €1.3 Million Lundbeck Foundation Award for Outstanding Neuroscience, With Nominations Closing 1 September 2026

The nomination window for The Brain Prize 2027 opened on 1 May 2026 and closes on 1 September 2026. The prize is awarded annually by the Lundbeck Foundation, a Danish enterprise foundation, and it is the largest research prize in neuroscience anywhere in the world. Recipients receive a gold medal and share a prize of €1.3 million, and they are presented with their medals in Copenhagen at a summer ceremony attended by HM The King of Denmark, who is the prize’s patron.

The Brain Prize is unusual among top-tier science prizes in one specific way: there is no closed nominating college. Anyone may submit a nomination. You do not need to be a member of an academy, hold a chair, or have won the prize yourself. The practical barrier is not permission — it is the quality of the case you make in a short, tightly constrained online form. That makes this a genuinely open call for anyone in the neuroscience community who believes a particular body of work has changed the field and has not yet been recognised.

What you cannot do is nominate yourself. The rule is explicit on the official page: only candidates nominated by others will be considered.

Key Details at a Glance

What the Prize Recognises

The Brain Prize was founded in 2011 by the Lundbeck Foundation. It is given for pioneering contributions to any field of neuroscience, and the official framing of “basic to clinical” is not decorative. The award history spans molecular and cellular neuroscience, systems and circuit work, theory and computation, and clinical medicine, and the committee has repeatedly rewarded discoveries whose importance only became legible over decades.

The 2026 prize went to Patrik Ernfors and David Ginty for their work on the cellular architecture of touch and pain — the diversity of peripheral sensory neuron types, how their peripheral endings are constructed, and how their signals are routed and processed in the spinal cord and brainstem. The Lundbeck Foundation’s own citation describes this body of work as having rewritten textbook principles of somatosensation and laid the groundwork for cell-type-specific interventions in pain. The 2026 ceremony was held on 20 May in Copenhagen.

Other recent awards give a useful sense of the range the committee is willing to cover. The 2024 prize recognised Larry F. Abbott, Haim Sompolinsky and Terrence J. Sejnowski for computational and theoretical neuroscience. The 2023 prize went to Michael Greenberg, Christine Holt and Erin Schuman for neuronal transcription and translation. The 2022 prize recognised Silvia Arber, Martyn Goulding and Ole Kiehn for circuits for movement. The 2021 prize went to Jes Olesen, Michael A. Moskowitz, Peter Goadsby and Lars Edvinsson for migraine research. The 2020 prize recognised Huda Zoghbi and Sir Adrian Peter Bird for Rett syndrome and epigenetics, and the 2017 prize went to Wolfram Schultz, Ray Dolan and Peter Dayan for learning and reward.

Two patterns are worth noticing if you are preparing a nomination. First, the prize is frequently awarded to a group of two to four scientists whose independent lines of work converged on one topic — the award is structured around a discovery, not around a single career. Second, the topics tend to be nameable in a phrase: optogenetics, migraine, long-term potentiation, circuits for movement. A nomination that cannot be summarised as a topic is at a structural disadvantage.

Who Should Be Nominated, and by Whom

Candidates must be research active. There is no age limit, no nationality requirement, no institutional requirement, and no restriction on subfield. A clinician-scientist whose work changed treatment practice is as eligible as a theorist who never touched a pipette.

On the nominating side, the eligibility rule is close to universal. Anyone may submit a nomination. The exclusions are narrow and specific: employees of the Lundbeck Foundation, members of the Lundbeck Foundation Board, and members of The Brain Prize selection committee may not nominate. Everyone else — postdocs, department heads, society officers, collaborators, former students, scientists in adjacent fields — may.

That openness cuts both ways. It means a well-argued nomination from a mid-career researcher is admissible. It also means the committee sees a substantial volume of submissions, and a nomination that simply asserts that someone is distinguished will not travel far. Your job is to make the discovery legible, not to certify the person’s reputation.

What a Nomination Must Contain

The nomination form is short and its limits are strict. The official requirements are:

• The nominee’s name, title, degree, affiliation, e-mail address, and gender.
• A statement about the achievement for which the nomination is made — maximum 1,500 characters.
• A separate statement about the specific contribution of each nominee to that achievement — maximum 5,000 characters per nominee.
• Up to 10 key publications for each nominee (optional).
• Number of citations and h-index for each nominee (optional).

Everything must be submitted electronically and in English through the Lundbeck Foundation online submission system, linked from the official nomination page.

The character limits are the most important design constraint here. Fifteen hundred characters is roughly 220 to 250 words — one tight paragraph. That statement has to do the heaviest lifting in the entire nomination: it defines the topic, states what was discovered, and explains why it mattered. The per-nominee statements, at 5,000 characters each, then partition credit: what did this person do that the others did not?

If you are nominating a group, the split between those two fields is the whole game. The achievement statement should be written once, for the topic, and should read as though it were a prize citation. The individual statements should be written separately for each person and should be specific about experiments, papers, or theoretical results attributable to them. A group nomination in which the individual statements are near-duplicates of each other invites the reading that the credit boundaries are not real.

How the Selection Process Works

The published timeline runs on an annual cycle:

• 1 May — the nomination window opens.
• 1 September — the nomination window closes. The selection committee then scores all nominations.
• October — the first selection committee meeting. Candidates are grouped and short-listed. Shortlisted candidates are sent out for peer review by external experts.
• January — the second selection committee meeting. The committee discusses the shortlisted candidates, the topics, and the peer reviews, chooses the recipients, and informs them.
• March — the official public announcement of the winner or winners.
• Summer — the award ceremony in Copenhagen, where HM The King of Denmark presents the medals.

The selection committee is an independent panel of ten leading scientists drawn from around the world and from across basic, translational and clinical neuroscience. Recipients are chosen only from the pool of nominated candidates — there is no mechanism by which the committee adds a name that nobody nominated.

The October step is where the “grouping” language matters. Nominations are not evaluated purely as isolated submissions; the committee groups candidates by topic. That means a nomination naming one person for a discovery that involved several may be merged with, or measured against, other nominations covering the same ground. Writing a nomination that anticipates this — that acknowledges the field’s structure and states clearly why your candidate or candidates are the right set — is more useful than writing one that pretends no one else worked on the problem.

The Five-Year Rule and What It Means for Timing

All nominations are retained and automatically considered for five years after the initial submission. A nomination filed for the 2027 prize therefore stays in the pool through several subsequent cycles without any action from you.

There are two practical consequences. First, missing this year’s 1 September deadline is not catastrophic if the work will still be current next May — but a nomination filed now starts accruing consideration years earlier. Second, an existing nomination cannot be edited. If the case has changed materially — a new result, a clinical readout, a major replication — the official guidance is that you may reuse text from a previous nomination, but you must submit a new form for the new year. Refreshing a stale nomination is a resubmission, not an edit.

You may also submit multiple nominations in a single year, for different topics and different candidates. There is no stated cap.

Preparing a Strong Nomination

Practical steps, in the order they are usually worth taking:

Pick the topic before you pick the people. The prize is organised around discoveries. Decide what phrase you are nominating — the two-to-five-word label a citation would use — and then decide which scientists that label credits.

Draft the achievement statement first and cut it hard. Write the 1,500-character statement before anything else. If you cannot state the discovery and its consequence within that budget, the case is not yet sharp enough.

Separate the credit cleanly. For each nominee, name the specific finding, method, or theoretical contribution that is theirs. Vague joint attribution weakens every name in the nomination.

Choose the ten publications deliberately. They are optional, but leaving them out forfeits an easy signal. Pick the papers that carried the discovery, not the ten most-cited papers on the CV. Reviewers reading the shortlist will follow these.

Be honest about the metrics fields. Citations and h-index are optional. For a candidate whose field is small or whose key contribution is old, these numbers may understate the case, and there is no obligation to supply them.

Get a second reader from outside the subfield. The selection committee spans basic, translational and clinical neuroscience. A statement that only makes sense to specialists in the candidate’s own niche loses ground in the scoring round.

Common Mistakes

• Self-nominating, or arranging an obviously proxied self-nomination. Self-nominations are not accepted, and the requirement that credit statements be specific makes a thinly disguised one easy to spot.
• Writing a career summary instead of a discovery statement. The prize is not a lifetime achievement award in form, even when it functions as one in effect.
• Ignoring the character limits until the end. Both statement fields are hard limits in an online form; drafting long and trimming in the submission box at the deadline produces weak prose.
• Nominating a candidate who is no longer research active. This is an explicit eligibility criterion.
• Treating an old nomination as still editable. It is retained for five years, but it cannot be changed. New information requires a new submission.
• Leaving submission to 1 September. The window is four months long. There is no stated grace period.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there an application fee? No fee is stated anywhere in the official nomination material.

Can I nominate more than one person for the same discovery? Yes. Multiple candidates who have contributed to a topic can be nominated within a single nomination, with a separate contribution statement for each.

Can I submit more than one nomination in a year? Yes — for different topics and candidates.

Does my nominee need to be affiliated with a Danish institution? No. Candidates may be of any nationality and work in any country. The Lundbeck Foundation is Danish, and the ceremony is in Copenhagen, but the prize is international.

Will my nominee be told they were nominated? The official material does not state that nominees are informed at the nomination stage; it states only that chosen recipients are informed after the January committee meeting. Do not promise a colleague otherwise.

What happens to my nomination data? Nominations are retained for five years and the material states that information is held in compliance with GDPR.

When would a 2027 winner be announced? In March, following the January selection meeting, with the ceremony in Copenhagen the following summer.

About the Lundbeck Foundation

The Lundbeck Foundation is one of Denmark’s largest enterprise foundations and describes its purpose as bringing discoveries to lives. Its philanthropic focus is neuroscience, spanning basic and translational science through to clinical application, with a stated ambition of positioning Denmark as a leading nation in brain research. The Foundation has said it aims to increase its average annual grant funding to at least €134 million by 2030, with a primary focus on brain research. The Brain Prize sits at the visible end of that programme: it is the Foundation’s instrument for drawing public attention to neuroscience and to the people doing it.

The Foundation’s registered address is Scherfigsvej 7, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark.

Official Links and Next Steps

The authoritative page for the 2027 cycle is the nomination and selection process page at brainprize.org/nomination-selection-process, which carries the eligibility rules, the field-by-field nomination requirements, the published selection timeline, and the link into the Lundbeck Foundation online submission system. General background on the prize, its history since 2011, and its past recipients is at brainprize.org. The Foundation itself is at lundbeckfonden.com.

If you intend to nominate for the 2027 prize, the immediate action is to draft the 1,500-character achievement statement and the per-nominee contribution statements now, then open the submission system with time to spare before 1 September 2026. Anything not filed by that date rolls to the next cycle at the earliest.