Twenty-eight group leaders become EMBO Young Investigators

EMBO welcomes the new cohort of 28 young investigators, who will be active members of the EMBO Young Investigator Programme for the next four years. Their research projects address a broad range of questions in the life sciences and include the gut microbiome of infants, the demographics of indigenous American populations, the neural blueprint of brain tumours and the role of the RNA polymerase II in transcription.

“EMBO is delighted to welcome the new young investigators. Their outstanding achievements demonstrate the excellence and ambition that will drive progress in the life sciences. We are pleased to support these young group leaders as they take the next steps in their careers, and we look forward to their discoveries and contributions to our community,” says EMBO Director Fiona Watt.

The new EMBO Young Investigators benefit from a variety of networking opportunities for them and their lab members. They become part of a vibrant network of more than 800 current and former EMBO Young Investigators, Installation Grantees and Global Investigators. Further benefits include training and mentoring opportunities, as well as access to core facilities at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. Young investigators also receive a financial award of 15,000 euros. They can apply for additional grants of up to 10,000 euros per year and gain support for networking activities, such as joint group meetings or travelling to conferences.

Of the 28 selected EMBO Young Investigators, 12 are female (43%), 14 are male (50%), and two did not specify their gender (7%). The programme received 233 eligible applications, and the success rate was 12%.

26 new young investigators are based in ten member states of the EMBC, the intergovernmental organization that funds the EMBO Programmes: Austria, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. One young investigator is based in India, which is an EMBC Associate Member State, and another is based in Taiwan, an EMBC Associate Member.

The next application deadline for the EMBO Young Investigator Programme is 1 April 2026. More information about the programme, including eligibility criteria and the application process, is available online.

New EMBO Young Investigators

	Name	Research project	Affiliation	Location
	Sebastian Baumgarten	Origin and function of ribosome heterogeneity	Institut Pasteur	Paris, FR
	Tapomoy Bhattacharjee	Understanding physical control over biological behaviour and cellular state	National Centre for Biological Sciences	Bangalore, IN
	Merav Cohen	Immune-controlled signalling niches dictating tissue physiology and cancer	Tel Aviv University	Tel Aviv, IL
	Tom Deegan	Mechanisms and regulation of chromosome replication	University of Edinburgh	Edinburgh, UK
	Anna Erzberger	Theory of cellular and multicellular organization	European Molecular Biology Laboratory	Heidelberg, DE
	Dmitry Ghilarov	Controlling molecular machines with post-translationally modified peptides	University of Oxford	Oxford, UK
	Alexander Hauser	Pleiotropic effects — from drug targets to drug actions	University of Copenhagen	Copenhagen, DK
	Daniel Hurdiss	Infection mechanisms of positive-strand RNA viruses	Utrecht University	Utrecht, NL
	Alexis Jourdain	Spatial organization of mitochondrial gene expression	University of Lausanne	Lausanne, CH
	Leeat Keren	Decoding the tumour microenvironment: advancing spatial proteomics in cancer	Weizmann Institute of Science	Rehovot, IL
	Francisca Martínez Real	Molecular basis of evolutionary innovation: a synthetic genomics approach	Centro Andaluz de Biología del Desarrollo	Seville, ES
	J. Víctor Moreno-Mayar	Tracing human demography, subsistence strategies and health using palaeogenomics	University of Copenhagen	Copenhagen, DK
	Raphael Johannes Morscher	Metabolism as master regulator of codon-specific translation	University Children's Hospital Zurich	Zurich, CH
	Bipin Pandey	Unravelling the molecular mechanisms how plant roots sense hard soils	University of Nottingham	Nottingham, UK
	Michelle Percharde	The role and regulation of transposable elements in mammalian development	MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences	London, UK
	Hana Polasek-Sedlackova	Deciphering human genome duplication and its regulation	Institute of Biophysics of the Czech Academy of Sciences	Brno, CZ
	Alejo E. Rodriguez-Fraticelli	Stem cell individuality	IRB Barcelona	Barcelona, ES
	Sara Sdelci	Fuelling fate: how nuclear metabolism shapes cell survival and ageing	Centre for Genomic Regulation	Barcelona, ES
	Ayala Shiber	Co-translational protein folding, misfolding and assembly in health and disease	Technion - Israel Institute of Technology	Haifa, IL
	Lora Sweeney	Development and evolution of motor circuits	Institute of Science and Technology Austria	Klosterneuburg, AT
	See-Yeun Ting	Interbacterial interactions within microbial communities	Institute of Molecular Biology, Academia Sinica	Taipei, TW
	Ana Tufegdžić Vidaković	Molecular basis of gene transcription	MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology	Cambridge, UK
	Jesse V. Veenvliet	Physiological constraints and the robustness of mammalian body plan formation	Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics	Dresden, DE
	Varun Venkataramani	Targeting the neural blueprint of brain tumours	Heidelberg University Hospital	Heidelberg, DE
	Berta Verd	From mechanism to morphology: evolving phenotypic diversity	University of Oxford	Oxford, UK
	Thomas Vogl	Deciphering human antibody repertoires against the microbiome in health and disease	Medical University of Vienna	Vienna, AT
	Michal Wieczorek	Nucleating complexity: exploring how cells assemble diverse microtubule networks	ETH Zurich	Zurich, CH
	Moran Yassour	The developing infant microbiome and its impact on paediatric health	The Hebrew University of Jerusalem	Jerusalem, IL