2025 ECNP Neuropsychopharmacology Award winner

6 May 2025, Press release (PDF)

One of Europe’s leading stress researchers, Carmen Sandi is a professor of neuroscience at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and director of the Laboratory of Behavioural Genetics at the EPFL’s Brain Mind Institute.  

Drawing upon a wide range of disciplinary approaches, from pharmacology to electrophysiology, neurochemistry, genetics, behavioural economics, and experimental psychology, combined with the innovative use of techniques such as neuroimaging, she has produced a remarkable record of research achievements connecting brain mechanisms (glucocorticoids, cell adhesion molecules, glutamate receptors) with the key functional effects of stress and anxiety on cognition, including learning, memory and behaviour.  

More recent work has focused on the mesolimbic system and the role of mitochondrial function in effort-based motivated behaviour, as well as the role of glucocorticoids in determining different neurodevelopmental trajectories following exposure to early life adversity. As ever, the goal is therapeutically oriented: to understand how early life stress affects behavioural programming and enhances the risk of developing psychopathologies such as sociability deficits and pathological aggression.  

Carmen Sandi has served as the director of the EPFL Brain Mind Institute (2012-19), the president of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS, 2018-20), and the president of the Cajal Advanced Neuroscience Training Programme (2019-20). She is a founder and former chair of the ALBA Network (2018-21), former president of the European Brain and Behaviour Society (EBBS, 2009-11), and co-founder and current co-president of the Global Stress and Resilience Network (GSRNet). She has also received a number of national and international awards, including the first Ron de Kloet Prize for Stress Research (2018), the John Scott Lifetime Award for Aggression Research (2020), and the Distinguished Investigator Award by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF, 2024). She was awarded the Valkhof Chair at Radboud University (2015), a Distinguished Visiting Scientist position at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2015), and a sabbatical professor at Rockefeller University in New York (2016). She was also the founding editor-in-chief of Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience (2007-14) and serves on the editorial boards of a variety of the field’s leading journals and institutional boards. She was a member of the Wellcome Science Panel (2019-21), served as panel leader for UK MQ Mental Health (2015-17), and was panel leader (2010-15) and chair (2022-24) for the European Research Council (ERC) Grants Panel LS5.