Celebration of The Brain Prize 2026
HM King Frederik of Denmark presented Professors Patrik Ernfors (Sweden) and David Ginty (USA) with their Brain Prize medals at a ceremony in Copenhagen on 20th May. The two neuroscientists receive the prize for their seminal work on the neuroscience of touch and pain.
The winners have transformed the field by revealing the cellular building blocks of touch and pain and the neural principles by which they are organized. Together, their discoveries have rewritten textbooks and provided the foundation for a new generation of targeted interventions for pain and disorders of touch based on specific cell types and neural pathways.
“The freedom to choose your own path in exploring the unknown, alongside brilliant PhD students, postdocs and collaborators, and to keep learning new things is deeply exciting. What is truly remarkable is that it never ends: each new discovery leads to new questions, and the unknown is always there, waiting to be understood. It is this spirit of curiosity and discovery that makes receiving the Brain Prize such a profound honor. The prize recognizes groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of the nervous system, and to be acknowledged in this way is both humbling and inspiriting. Beyond this, the prize signifies the importance of pursuing new knowledge as the foundation for understanding chronic pain and developing new therapeutic strategies for pain relief,” said .
also commented on what the prize means for him: “Receiving the Brain Prize is a great honor. I feel incredibly fortunate to receive recognition for doing something that I love – probing the unknown with my talented and dedicated staff, students, and postdocs. They are an endless source of joy and inspiration. I hope that this Brain Prize inspires aspiring young scientists to keep pushing boundaries to explain how we experience the world and ultimately devise remedies for those who struggle with sensory disorders and chronic pain.”
This year’s celebration took place in Copenhagen with nearly 400 guests that included representatives from the Danish and international neuroscience communities, the broader Danish life science and business sectors, the Danish ministries, foreign ambassadors, and not least patron of the prize, HM The King of Denmark, Frederik X.
The Brain Prize is the world’s largest award for outstanding contributions to neuroscience, worth EUR 1.3 million. It has been awarded every year since 2011 by the Lundbeck Foundation.
Read more about The Brain Prize
and watch the portrait film of the winners 2026
on .
The Lundbeck Foundation is an enterprise foundation encompassing a comprehensive range of enterprise and philanthropic activities – all united by its strong purpose; Bringing Discoveries to Lives. The Foundation is the long-term and engaged owner of several international healthcare companies – Lundbeck, Falck, ALK-Abello, Ferrosan Medical Devices, Ellab and WS Audiology – and an active investor in business, science and people through its commercial investments in the financial markets; in biotech companies based on Danish research and through philanthropic grants to science talents and programmes in Danish universities. By 2030, the Foundation aims to increase its average annual grants to at least DKK 1bn primarily focusing on the brain – including the world's largest brain research prize: .
