ERC grantee wins the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine
The 2025 Shaw Laureates have been announced on 27 May 2025 in Hong Kong, and Professor Wolfgang Baumeister of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (MPIB) has been awarded the Prize in Life Science and Medicine.
Wolfgang Baumeister, a German molecular biologist and biophysicist, has played a central role in the advancement of cryogenic-electron tomography (cryo-ET). He has been recognised for his pioneering work in developing and applying cryo-ET, an advanced imaging technique that allows for three-dimensional visualisation of biological structures-such as proteins, macromolecular complexes and cellular compartments-within their native cellular environment.
Professor Baumeister’s research has been supported by the ERC since 2013. His first ERC Synergy Grant, with Professors Matthias Mann from the same institute and Ruediger Klein from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, focused on toxic protein aggregation in neurodegeneration.
In 2020, he was awarded a second ERC Synergy Grant together with Professors Wolf B. Frommer and Rüdiger Simon (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf) and Waltraud Schulze (University of Hohenheim), to study the structural elucidation of plasmodesmata, the microscopic channels that connect plant cells, at near-atomic resolution using cryo-ET. The two ERC grants totalled more than 24 million euro.
About the Shaw Prize
The Shaw Prize is an international prize that presents three annual awards, namely the Prize in Astronomy, the Prize in Life Science and Medicine, and the Prize in Mathematical Sciences, beginning from 2004. Each prize carries a monetary award of 1.2 million US dollars since 2016.
