Matthias Mann and Wolfgang Baumeister Receive Prestigious 2026 Gairdner International Awards
The director and the director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (MPIB) are receiving the award for their respective contributions to their fields of research.
Matthias Mann, Director of the “Proteomics and Signal Transduction” department at the MPIB in Martinsried, is being honored “For establishing the foundations of modern systems proteomics through transformative innovations in quantitative protein measurement, mass spectrometry technologies, and computational analysis.” He will receive the prize together with John R. Yates III of the Scripps Research Institute, USA, and Ruedi Aebersold, Emeritus at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
Wolfgang Baumeister, Director Emeritus at the MPIB, receives the Gairdner Award “For developing cryo-electron tomography, a method that visualizes molecular structures inside intact cells at near-native resolution, creating a new way to study cellular architecture and revealing the inner workings of life at the molecular level.”
The scientists receive the award not only for the outstanding scientific quality of their research, but also for their fundamental contributions to the advancement of their respective fields through their research and technological developments. The Gairdner Award specifically focuses on the integration of basic research and its practical applications. The International Gairdner Award comes with a prize of 250,000 Canadian dollars.
Kikuë Tachibana, the current MPIB Managing Director, states: “On behalf of the faculty, I congratulate our two awardees and their co-recipients on receiving two Gairdner Awards for their outstanding work in different fields at the same time. These recognitions of excellence highlight the research opportunities and the potential collaborations that foster world-class research in our institute.”
About Matthias Mann
Matthias Mann, born in Thuine in 1959, studied physics and mathematics at the Georg-August University in Göttingen. In 1988, he received his doctorate in chemical engineering from Yale University in New Haven, USA. After a postdoctoral stay at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, he became group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg in 1992. In 1998 he was appointed Professor of Bioinformatics at the University of Southern Denmark. Matthias Mann is Director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried/Planegg near Munich since 2005.
Mann is a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the US National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received numerous awards for his research, including the Dr. H. P. Heineken Award (2024), the Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine (2012), the Körber European Science Prize (2012), and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (2012). With over 380,000 citations and an H-index of 282 (Google Scholar), he is the most cited scientist in Germany.
About Wolfgang Baumeister
Wolfgang Baumeister studied biology, chemistry, and physics at the universities of Münster and Bonn, receiving his doctorate in biophysics in 1973 from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in the lab of Helmut Ruska. His scientific career took him to positions as a research assistant at HHU (1973–1980) and as a Heisenberg Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge (1981–1982) before joining the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, where he worked from 1983 to 2021, first as group leader of Molecular Structural Biology and later as director. Since 1987, he has been an extraordinary professor with teaching privileges at the Faculty of Chemistry at the Technical University of Munich. Baumeister also holds an honorary professorship at the Faculty of Physics at the Technical University of Munich since 2000. And since 2023, he has been a distinguished professor at ShanghaiTech University in China.
Baumeister is a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the US National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received numerous awards for his research, including the Warburg Medal (1998), the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine (2003), the Harvey Prize for Science and Technology (2005), the Alexander Hollaender Award in Biophysics (2022), the Rosenstiel Award in Basic Medical Sciences (2023) and the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine (2025).
About the Gairdner Foundation
The mission of the Gairdner Foundation is to celebrate, inform and inspire scientific excellence around the globe.
Established in 1957, the Gairdner Foundation is dedicated to fulfilling James A. Gairdner’s vision to recognize major research contributions to the treatment of disease and alleviation of human suffering. Through the prestigious annual Canada Gairdner Awards, the Foundation celebrates the world’s most creative and accomplished researchers whose work is improving the health and wellbeing of people around the world. Since its inception, 434 awards have been bestowed on laureates from over 40 countries, and of those awardees, 103 have gone on to receive Nobel Prizes.
The Gairdner Foundation brings people together to openly discuss science in order to better engage the public, understand the problems we face, and work together to find solutions. Through Gairdner Connects, our national outreach program, we bring science to communities across Canada to inspire future innovators and spark public dialogue about the role of research in addressing the world’s most pressing health challenges.
