The Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology honors early-career scientists, 35 years of age or younger, who have shared their exceptional research through personal essays. In a ceremony on November 16, 2025, in San Diego during the week of the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, representatives from Eppendorf and Science awarded neuroscientist Cheng Lyu with the top honor. Lyu was joined by finalists Constanze Depp and Sara Mederos, and all three scientists presented their research to the awards ceremony attendees.
Top prize winner Cheng Lyu presented his research on rewiring olfactory circuits in fruit flies during the 2025 Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology ceremony.
Eppendorf
Cheng Lyu is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in the laboratory of Liqun Luo. His prize-winning research focuses on rewiring the fruit fly olfactory neural circuit to understand its development. During his presentation at the awards ceremony, he discussed the process of manipulating Drosophila neural circuits to alter courtship behaviors. “[The altered males] show this enormous interest in each other, and they constantly chase. This chase last for hours,” Lyu said. “They even bump into each other, and sometimes they even form this…courtship chain.” Lyu has plans to start his own laboratory in the School of Life Sciences at Westlake University. “In my own lab, I will study the development function of these fly brain regions with the aim to understand, one day, how developmental changes shape our cognition,” he concluded.
The first of two finalists recognized at the awards ceremony was Constanze Depp, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She was recognized for research performed while earning her PhD at the University of Göttingen, working in the laboratory of Klaus-Armin Nave at the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine. There, she explored the role of oligodendrocytes and the myelin they produce in Alzheimer's disease. “This work really started and was motivated by a bigger question, which is, why is aging this major risk factor for the development of Alzheimer's disease?” Depp explained during her presentation. “In my PhD, I discovered a mechanism that might help us explain this age-related vulnerability. This mechanism was a pretty intricate interplay between oligodendrocytes, myelin, microglia, and amyloid.”
Sara Mederos, a Wellcome Early Career Fellow working for the Sainsbury Wellcome Center at University College London, joined Depp as a finalist. Her work on the brain’s fear response, conducted in Sonja Hofer’s laboratory, explored how organisms can learn to suppress their fear instincts. For example, experiments where Mederos mimicked an approaching predator caused mice to run to a shelter for safety. After this threat was repeated multiple times without negative repercussions, the mice no longer hid. “So, mice learn to actually suppress this native escape response,” Mederos said during her talk. Next year, she will start an independent lab at the Hospital del Mar Research Institute in Barcelona as a Ramón y Cajal Fellow.
The 2025 Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology ceremony highlighted the creativity, rigor, and ambition that drive early-career researchers. Through their diverse work, Lyu, Depp, and Mederos showcased how fundamental research can reshape the understanding of the brain.
