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The notification of Stanford University professor Karl Deisseroth’s Nobel Prize came after midnight, but it didn’t disrupt sandwich prep for his children on Monday morning.
Deisseroth was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology for discoveries in optogenetics, a “way of understanding what cells are actually doing in the body.” Deisseroth is a professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences in the schools of engineering and medicine. He obtained his MD and PhD in neuroscience from Stanford and shares the award with his colleagues Peter Hegemann from the Humboldt University of Berlin and Georg Nagel from the University of Würzburg in Germany.
“I want to share the moment with all the people who work with me, the students and the staff and the postdocs,” Deisseroth said in a Monday press conference. “I’m looking forward to celebrating by doing more scientific communication with the public. … I’d like to share the story of how microbial proteins are helping us.”
Despite the late-night news, Deisseroth was on sandwich duty Monday morning: turkey-and-salami for two of his children and almond butter-and-honey for his daughter. Deisseroth is a father of five with his wife Michelle Monje-Deisseroth, also an MD-PhD and Stanford faculty member.
“Dad, you’ve won all the prizes!” their 10-year-old daughter Sophie said Monday morning in reaction to the news, according to a video posted on social media by Stanford.
Deisseroth is the 37th Nobel laureate from Stanford University, and the fourth from Stanford to receive the award for physiology or medicine. The prize comes with a 12 million Swedish kroner award – roughly $1.2 million – to be split among the three researchers.
Described by Stanford School of Engineering Dean Jennifer Widom as a “renaissance man” with a love of literature and poetry, Deisseroth is a practicing psychiatrist who continues to see patients in addition to running his lab.
“This recognition is a testament to Karl’s engineering mindset, his creativity, ingenuity and unwavering dedication to solving problems for the benefit of humankind,” Widom said. “He’s been an educator, a mentor (and) a guiding light for countless researchers worldwide.”
Optogenetics helps researchers understand what the brain does for perception, cognition and action. Because the brain is a complex organ with billions of cells, it is hard to study precisely, but optogenetics uses light to make things happen and illuminate connections between different parts of the brain, Deisseroth explained. This allows researchers to map function and dysfunction in the brain.
“We can turn those on and off with millisecond precision in real time during behavior, during cognition,” Deisseroth said. “We take genes from microbes and we put them into neurons, into brains, into other cells in the body, and we turn them on or off with lasers, holograms, fiber optics. It’s a real confluence of engineering and medicine.”
Deisseroth’s colleague Hegemann is an algal biologist while Nagel studies molecular plant physiology. In the early 2000s, Hegemann and Nagel discovered a unique algal protein sensitive to blue light which Deisseroth transformed into a light-controlled switch for nerve cells. Together, the trio’s interdisciplinary research “capture the full journey of discovery,” he told the Stanford Report.
By understanding what causes function in the brain, optogenetics can be used in direct and indirect therapies. In one application of the former, a microbial protein can be used to treat retinitis pigmentosa, an illness that causes the retina to degenerate, causing blindness. In indirect applications, optogenetics is used to understand what cells cause a certain symptom, and to use that knowledge to design a therapy that targets those cells. Indirect optogenetics is being used to design treatments targeting autism, Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia, Deisseroth said.
Researchers are also exploring how optogenetics could be used for brain-computer interfaces, which are communication systems that allow a person to control an external device, such as a prosthesis, using brain signals. That research is farther afield, but has exciting possibilities for people with spinal cord injuries or strokes, Deisseroth said.
Optogenetics has also helped researchers understand the nature of emotions. For a century, psychologists have wondered whether emotion originates inside the brain or the body. To unravel this question, Deisseroth and his colleagues designed an optogenetics experiment that involved sticking microbial proteins in the heart of mice.
“We looked for changes in fear or anxiety responses, and we found them,” he said. “It required interaction between the brain and the body for the full anxiety-like state to be manifested.”
After celebrating the prize with his colleagues, Deisseroth plans to celebrate by returning to his research.
“One way to celebrate is to get right back to work,” he said.
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