Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Lisa Maier receives the EMBL Alumni Award

The EMBL Alumni Awards recognise outstanding alumni who have made exceptional contributions in the fields of science, technology or science communication. Launched in 2007, the John Kendrew Award honours alumni who are at the beginning of their careers (two to seven years after leaving EMBL) for outstanding achievements in science or science communication.
Lisa Maier, who was a postdoctoral fellow in Nassos Typas's group in the Genome Biology Unit at EMBL Heidelberg from 2015 to 2018, receives the 2026 John Kendrew Award in recognition of her pioneering work on how commonly used drugs affect the human gut microbiome.

After leaving EMBL, Lisa Maier established her own research group at the University of Tübingen, supported by the Emmy Noether Programme. With the launch in Tübingen in 2019, Lisa Maier became a junior research group leader at the CMFI. In her further research, she developed proof-of-concept strategies to prevent antibiotic-induced damage to the microbiome and showed how certain non-antibiotics can disrupt colonisation resistance and thereby increase the risk of infection. In 2022, she was appointed professor of microbiome-host interactions and has since acquired numerous third-party funds. 

According to the selection committee, Lisa Maier's work has far-reaching consequences for how drug development and antimicrobial interventions will be designed in the future. In particular, she has shown that clinically established drugs can have unexpected effects on gut microbes. Maier also developed strategies to protect the gut ecosystem while maintaining the efficacy of drugs. In addition, the committee recognised her influential role in promoting the next generation of researchers and her commitment to communicating and disseminating her research findings to a wide audience.

Find out more about the EMBL Alumni Award recipients of 2026: https://www.embl.org/news/awards-honours/announcing-the-2026-embl-alumni-award-recipients/