image: Biochemist Professor Ana Pombo, Max Delbrück Center, Berlin
Credit: Photo credit: Pablo Castagnola
The German Research Foundation (DFG) announced on December 11 that biochemist Ana Pombo from the Max Delbrück Center is among this year’s winners of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. The Leibniz Prize is Germany’s most important research funding award and comes with a grant of €2.5 million.
A DNA strand, which is two meters long, is carefully folded within a cell nucleus only ten micrometers in diameter. This folding creates a spatial interplay between genes and their regulatory elements. Professor Ana Pombo seeks to understand how environmental factors and experiences influence this three-dimensional interplay and how diseases such as autism or epilepsy can arise. Her research group at the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology of the Max Delbrück Center (MDC-BIMSB) develops new tools to better understand this fundamental mechanism. In 2017, her team published a method in the journal “Nature” that can map the 3D structure of entire genomes.
For her groundbreaking work, the primary committee of the German Research Foundation (DFG) decided to honor Ana Pombo and nine other scientists with Germany’s most significant research funding 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 aim to reverse disease-causing cellular changes as early as possible in the future. To achieve this, we first need to decode the mechanisms that, like a complex clockwork, determine how our genome functions,” says Professor Maike Sander, Scientific Director of the Max Delbrück Center. “Ana Pombo’s work makes a fundamental contribution to this goal. She is a true pioneer. We warmly congratulate 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.
Max Delbrück Center
The Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (Max Delbrück Center) is one of the world’s leading biomedical research institutions. Max Delbrück, a Berlin native, was a Nobel laureate and one of the founders of molecular biology. At the locations in Berlin-Buch and Mitte, researchers from some 70 countries study human biology – investigating the foundations of life from its most elementary building blocks to systems-wide mechanisms. By understanding what regulates or disrupts the dynamic equilibrium of a cell, an organ, or the entire body, we can prevent diseases, diagnose them earlier, and stop their progression with tailored therapies. Patients should be able to benefit as soon as possible from basic research discoveries. This is why the Max Delbrück Center supports spin-off creation and participates in collaborative networks. It works in close partnership with Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin in the jointly-run Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC), the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) at Charité, and the German Center for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK). Founded in 1992, the Max Delbrück Center today employs 1,800 people and is 90 percent funded by the German federal government and 10 percent by the State of Berlin.