The Brain Prize 2027: Historical Reference for the Closed Nomination Cycle

The Brain Prize 2027: Historical Reference for the Closed Nomination Cycle

The nomination cycle for The Brain Prize 2027 is closed. The Lundbeck Foundation announced that nominations would close on 1 September 2026; the official material located for this review does not announce a later cycle or a new deadline. This page is therefore a historical reference to the 2027 award cycle, not an open call. Do not treat the cycle details below as permission to submit now. The Foundation awards the prize annually. For the 2027 cycle, the award was described as 10 million Danish kroner (approximately €1.3 million), shared by one or more recipients, who also receive gold medals at a ceremony in Copenhagen.

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. During the 2027 call, anyone outside the stated exclusions could submit a nomination. That open nomination rule described who could participate while the cycle was active; it does not mean the portal remains open after its published closing date. Anyone considering a future nomination should wait for a new official call and check its requirements, since dates and form instructions may change.

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 award history illustrates the breadth of work the committee considers. Recipients have been recognised for research on sensory systems, computational neuroscience, neuronal gene expression, motor circuits, migraine, developmental disorders and learning. These examples show that the prize is not restricted to one method, disease area or career stage. The official criteria describe eligible work broadly across neuroscience, from basic research to applied clinical research, and the committee evaluates nominations in relation to the contribution being recognised.

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 2027 Nomination Had to Contain

The Foundation described the 2027 nomination form as short and straightforward. The archived requirements listed below applied to that cycle; confirm the form anew if a later call is published:

• 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).

For the 2027 cycle, the nomination had to be submitted electronically and in English through the Lundbeck Foundation online submission system linked from the official nomination page. That portal is not presented here as open now. For a later cycle, first confirm an active call on the official page, then follow the current portal instructions and its current form limits.

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 2027 nomination deadline has passed, so the timeline below is useful as a description of the annual process rather than an active schedule for applicants. The Foundation’s published annual sequence places the nomination period in the months before the September closing date. After nominations close, the selection committee reviews and groups candidate nominations by topic; shortlisted candidates may be sent for external peer review. A later committee discussion selects recipients, with the annual announcement expected in March and the award ceremony in Copenhagen in May or June. These are stages in the general process, not additional submission windows. The official page should be checked when a future call is announced for its dates and any revised instructions.

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 grouping stage described in the archived selection process means nominations may be considered together by topic rather than only as isolated submissions. A nomination naming one person for a discovery that involved several may be considered alongside other nominations covering the same ground. For a future submission, acknowledge the field’s structure and explain clearly why the nominated candidate or candidates represent the contribution.

The Five-Year Rule and What It Means for Timing

The existing page describes a five-year retention rule for nominations and says that earlier nominations are automatically reconsidered during that period. That rule is relevant to nominators whose candidates were already submitted; it does not reopen the 2027 form or establish when a future cycle will begin. The archived guidance also says an existing nomination cannot be edited, and that a new form is needed if a nominator wishes to update a case. Anyone relying on those details for a future round should confirm them against the official instructions then in force.

The 2027 call allowed multiple nominations for different topics or candidates. There is no reason to interpret that as a current invitation to submit: the call’s stated closing date has passed. The official nomination page remains the place to look for a later announcement and for confirmation that these procedural details have not changed.

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.
• Assuming the 2027 portal remains open after its deadline. The published closing date has passed, and no grace period is identified in the call announcement. Wait for a new official call before submitting for a later cycle.

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.

Is there a live deadline now? No later nomination cycle or deadline is announced in the official material located for this review. The 2027 cycle closed on 1 September 2026.

When are winners usually announced? The annual process announces recipients in March, followed by a ceremony in Copenhagen in May or June. Check the Foundation’s official page for the applicable schedule for any future cycle.

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 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 was 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.

The 2027 nomination cycle is closed. The Foundation’s official announcements located for this review give 1 September 2026 as its deadline and do not identify a later cycle or deadline. Nominations not submitted by the closing date should not be assumed to roll forward automatically; the five-year rule applies to nominations already submitted, as described above. For a future opportunity, use the nomination and selection process page to confirm that a new call has opened, its deadline, the prize amount, eligibility, and current form requirements before taking action. This file preserves the 2027 rules as an archive and should be revisited only when the Foundation publishes new cycle information.