Dr. Karl Deisseroth Receives the 2021 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award!

Dr. Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist and the 2018 Kyoto Prize laureate in Advanced Technology, received the 2021 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award on September 24, 2021. The Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award is one of the international prizes for medical science awarded by the Lasker Foundation. Congratulations for the great honor!

This year’s award was given to Dr. Deisseroth, Dr. Peter Hegemann of the Humboldt University of Berlin, and Dr. Dieter Oesterhelt of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry for “the discovery of light-sensitive microbial proteins that can activate or silence individual brain cells and for their use in developing optogenetics—a revolutionary technique for neuroscience.”

Former Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award winners include a number of Kyoto Prize laureates such as Dr. Shinya Yamanaka and Dr. Robert G. Roeder.

*The photo is of Dr. Deisseroth during the Kyoto Prize Week in 2018.