Stanford University

“In many ways, we’re just getting going.”

Karl Deisseroth reflects on his Nobel moment, the discoveries ahead, and the collaborations that make Stanford special. “There’s a freedom of movement, a free diffusion of ideas, of people, that I haven’t encountered anywhere else.”

The professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences shares the 2026 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with two other researchers for their work in optogenetics, which makes it possible to switch on, or off, the activity of individual nerve cells in a living brain.

🎥: Kurt Hickman