DegreeStep
Menu

Research and innovation

Research and innovation news

The year's major research prizes, discoveries and new funding for students and researchers, and why each one matters if you are planning a degree or a PhD.

October 2026

AwardNobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026 goes to the discoverers of optogeneticsKarl Deisseroth of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Stanford University, Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University of Berlin and Georg Nagel of the University of Würzburg share the prize. Hegemann and Nagel found channelrhodopsin, a light-sensitive protein in a single-celled alga; Deisseroth turned it into a switch that lets researchers turn individual nerve cells on and off with light.Read the full story →FundingThree doctoral fellowships in AI and robotics open at ETH ZurichETH Zurich is recruiting for its AI Center Doctoral Fellowship (8 to 12 places, closing 27 October), the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems (closing 2 November) and the RobotX PhD Fellowship in robotics (closing 15 December).Read the full story →FundingChevening Scholarships for 2027–28 close on 6 October at 11:00 UTCApplications for the UK government's fully funded one-year master's scholarships close on 6 October 2026 at 11:00 UTC, after which the online system shuts. Shortlisting for interviews follows in mid-February 2027.Read the full story →

September 2026

AwardLasker Awards 2026: the brain's wakefulness signal, and a new treatment for haemophilia AEmmanuel Mignot of Stanford University and Masashi Yanagisawa of the University of Tsukuba won the basic research award for identifying orexin, the brain peptide that keeps us awake, and showing that its loss causes narcolepsy. Three scientists at Chugai Pharmaceutical in Tokyo won the clinical award for an antibody that restores blood clotting in haemophilia A, and Michael J. Fox the public service award for his work on Parkinson's disease.Read the full story →

July 2026

AwardFields Medals 2026 for Yu Deng, John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman and Hong WangMathematics' highest honour for researchers under 40 was announced at the opening of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia. The work it recognises ranges from deriving the equations of gases and waves, through symplectic geometry and arithmetic geometry, to harmonic analysis and the Kakeya problem in three dimensions.Read the full story →

June 2026

AwardKavli Prizes 2026: how the Milky Way was built, 'twistronics', and protein-making in neuronsThe astrophysics prize went to Vasily Belokurov, Amina Helmi and Rodrigo Ibata for showing that our galaxy grew by swallowing smaller ones. The nanoscience prize went to Eva Andrei, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero and Allan MacDonald for founding twistronics, which changes a material's properties by twisting atom-thin layers. The neuroscience prize went to Christine Holt, Kelsey Martin, Erin Schuman and Oswald Steward for showing that neurons make proteins locally, where they are needed. Each prize is worth US$1 million.Read the full story →

April 2026

AwardBreakthrough Prizes 2026: gene therapies, ALS genetics and the muon's magnetismThree life-sciences prizes honoured the first FDA-approved gene therapy for an inherited disease (a form of blindness), the switch from fetal to adult haemoglobin behind new sickle-cell treatments, and the most common genetic cause of ALS and frontotemporal dementia. Frank Merle won in mathematics, and the Muon g-2 collaborations at CERN, Brookhaven and Fermilab in fundamental physics. Each prize is worth US$3 million.Read the full story →

March 2026

AwardAbel Prize 2026 to Gerd Faltings for his work in arithmetic geometryThe Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters awarded the prize to Gerd Faltings of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, for powerful new tools in arithmetic geometry and for settling long-standing conjectures of Mordell and Lang about whole-number solutions to equations. He is the first German to receive it.Read the full story →AwardTuring Award goes to the founders of quantum information scienceACM named Charles Bennett of IBM Research and Gilles Brassard of the Université de Montréal as recipients of the 2025 A.M. Turing Award. In 1984 they introduced BB84, the first practical protocol for quantum cryptography, and in 1993, with colleagues, quantum teleportation. The award carries US$1 million.Read the full story →