Gioele La Manno receives the Boehringer Ingelheim FENS Research Award
© 2026 EPFL
EPFL neuroscientist Gioele La Manno has received the 2026 Boehringer Ingelheim FENS Research Award for his contributions to our understanding of how the brain develops.
The Boehringer Ingelheim FENS Research Award is one of Europe’s leading distinctions in neuroscience. Presented by the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) with support from Boehringer Ingelheim, the award "recognises outstanding and innovative scientific work in any area of neuroscience research."
The 2026 Boehringer Ingelheim FENS Research Award has been awarded to EPFL professor Gioele La Manno.
La Manno leads the Laboratory of Brain Development and Biological Data Science at EPFL’s School of Life Sciences. He was also the School’s first ELISR scholar. His research combines single-cell genomics, spatial omics, lipidomics, and computational approaches to study how progenitor states of stem cells acquire identity during embryonic brain development.
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.
La Manno will present the award lecture in Barcelona at the 2026 FENS Forum, Europe’s largest international neuroscience conference. The Forum gathers thousands of neuroscientists from around the world and serves as one of the field’s most important venues for sharing discoveries and building collaborations.