The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Medicine 2020 to Karl Deisseroth, Professor of Bioengineering and of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Stanford University in California, and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland, USA. Deisseroth is receiving the prize for developing optogenetics — a method to influence the activity of nerve cells with light — as well as for developing hydrogel-tissue chemistry, which enables researchers to make biological tissue accessible to light and molecular probes. Both discoveries play an important role in current brain research.
For more information see Press release (pdf)