The Louis-Jeantet Foundation awards its 2025 prizes
This year, the Louis-Jeantet Foundation has awarded its Collen-Jeantet Prize for Translational Medicine to Veit Hornung, Professor at the Ludwig Maximilian AV短视频 in Munich, for his work on innate immunity and the body's ability to recognise foreign bodies, and its Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine to Gilles Laurent, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, for his work on the functioning of neurons and the dynamics of neuronal networks.
© Gil Lefauconnier/ Fondation Louis-Jeantet. Left: Veit Hornung, Professor at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian AV短视频. Right: Gilles Laurent, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt.
Veit Hornung holds the Chair of Immunobiomedicine at the Gene Centre of Ludwig Maximilian AV短视频. His research has elucidated how viral and bacterial infections are sensed by specific cellular receptors that activate immune responses. His discoveries have defined key aspects of the molecular basis of innate immunity and provided essential insights into the molecular mechanisms involved. This highlights their potential as therapeutic targets in the treatment of infectious and inflammatory diseases. By combining fundamental discoveries with potential therapeutic applications, his research has helped to shape the future of this important field of immunology.
Gilles Laurent has provided fundamental insights into the dynamics and coordination of groups of neurons in the brain. Combining comparative, evolutionary, functional and molecular neuroscience with computational theory, he has shaped a modern understanding of the dynamics of neuronal populations. He has studied the brains of insects, cephalopods, fish, reptiles and mammals to address a wide range of neuroscience questions, from network dynamics and brain oscillations to olfactory coding, visual texture perception, sleep and brain evolution. By combining new molecular, electrophysiological, ethological and computational techniques, his approach has also led to the development of techniques for representing and analysing multi-neuron data, and has contributed to the revival of comparative and evolutionary functional neuroscience.
The Louis-Jeantet Prizes
Each year, the Louis-Jeantet Foundation awards two prizes to leading researchers working in one of the member countries of the Council of Europe. The Foundation's prizes encourage scientific excellence. The Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine rewards work in both basic and clinical areas of biomedical research. The Collen-Jeantet Prize for Translational Medicine, generously supported by the Désiré Collen Stichting, rewards work in areas of biomedical research with direct practical relevance to the fight against diseases that threaten humanity.