Research / 13.12.2024
Leibniz Prize awarded to Ana Pombo

The German Research Foundation (DFG) has announced that biochemist Ana Pombo from the Max Delbrück Center is among this year’s winners of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. With a grant of €2.5 million, the Leibniz Prize is one of the highest endowed research prizes in Germany.

Cells neatly fold two meters of their DNA into a nucleus only ten micrometers in diameter. Professor Ana Pombo is exploring this genome contortion mechanism to better understand how environmental exposures and experiences affect the spatial interaction between genes and their “on” and “off” switches.  In 2017, her research group at the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology of the Max Delbrück Center (MDC-BIMSB) published a method in the journal “Nature” that can map the 3D architecture of entire genomes. By understanding how conformational changes in DNA affect how genes are regulated, researchers can develop ways to intervene.

For her groundbreaking work, the primary committee of the German Research Foundation (DFG) has honored Ana Pombo and nine other scientists with Germany’s most significant research award. She will receive the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize at a ceremonial event on March 19, 2025. The prize comes with a grant of €2.5 million.

“We seek to reverse disease-causing cellular changes at the earliest possible stage. Achieving this requires a deep understanding of the mechanisms that govern genome function,” says Professor Maike Sander, Scientific Director of the Max Delbrück Center. “Ana Pombo's groundbreaking work is making a fundamental contribution to this goal. As a true pioneer in the field, we extend our warmest congratulations to her.” 

About Ana Pombo

Ana Pombo was born in 1969 in Portugal and studied biochemistry at the University of Lisbon. After completing her doctorate at the University of Oxford, she initially worked as a group leader at the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences at Imperial College London, U.K. In 2013, she joined the Max Delbrück Center and simultaneously took on a professorship in Transcriptional Regulation and Genome Architecture at Humboldt University in Berlin. She is the Deputy Director of MDC-BIMSB and Deputy Program Spokesperson for the Max Delbrück Center. In 2007, she received the Robert Feulgen Prize and is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and the European Academy of Sciences.

Ana Pombo joins two previous winners at the Max Delbrück Center: Professor Nikolaus Rajewsky and Professor Carmen Birchmeier. Since 1985, the DFG has been honoring outstanding top researchers with the Leibniz Prize. The award provides recipients with opportunities to expand their research and hire highly qualified early-career scientists. The 2025 Leibniz Prizes will be presented in a ceremony on March 19, 2025, in Berlin. The award ceremony will be preceded by an event celebrating the 40th anniversary of the program, where all previous prize recipients will be able to connect and network.

Source: Press Release Max Delbrück Center
Leibniz Prize awarded to Ana Pombo