Stanford professor wins Nobel Prize for breakthrough in nerve cell control using light

A Stanford University professor was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for pioneering work that helped give scientists an unprecedented way to control and study nerve cells using light.

Karl Deisseroth, a professor of Bioengineering and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, shares the prize with Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University of Berlin and Georg Nagel of the University of Würzburg. In a statement on Monday, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, cited the three scientists “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.”