The winners of the 2010 Leibniz Prize have been officially announced. At its meeting in Bonn today, the Joint Committee of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) named ten researchers as recipients of Germany's most prestigious scientific prize. The winners were chosen by the Nominations Committee from among 170 nominees.

The Leibniz Prize award ceremony will be held on 15 March 2010 in Berlin. The DFG and the German scientific community will also be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Leibniz Programme. The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize has been awarded by the DFG every year since 1986 for outstanding achievements in research. Since the programme started, 280 Leibniz Prizes have been awarded, including those announced today. Of these prizes, 97 were awarded in the natural sciences, 79 in the life sciences, 61 in the humanities and social sciences and 43 in the engineering sciences. Due to the fact that the Leibniz Prize and the prize money can be shared, the number of prizewinners is higher than the number of prizes: A total of 303 nominees have received the prize to date.

"The Leibniz Prize has long been Germany's most distinguished science prize for researchers and also one of world's most prestigious scientific awards," said the DFG President, Professor Matthias Kleiner, on the occasion of the announcement of this year's prizewinners and the upcoming anniversary. Kleiner called to mind the fact that six Leibniz prizewinners have gone on to receive the Nobel Prize: 1988 Professor Hartmut Michel (chemistry), 1991 Professors Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann (medicine), 1995 Professor Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (medicine), 2005 Professor Theodor W. Hänsch (physics) and 2007 Professor Gerhard Ertl (chemistry).

According to Kleiner, the Leibniz Prize recipients stand for scientific discoveries and accomplishments of the highest calibre and they have proven: "In science too, everything depends on the person involved. At the end of the day, science and research are advanced by individual personalities, who are motivated by their own thirst for knowledge, their own intellectual curiosity and their own courage to ask new questions and to explore new territory." This courage and the accomplishments it leads to are rewarded in three ways by the Leibniz Prize: "The prize brings its winner worldwide recognition, a substantial award of up to 2.5 million euros and above all the freedom to use this money over the following seven years to pursue their own scientific agenda, without any bureaucratic overhead—truly idyllic freedom," said Kleiner, alluding to the words of former DFG President, Professor Hubert Markl.

One of the winners is Professor Dr Petra Schwille (41), Biophysics, Dresden University of Technology. Petra Schwille's work has considerably advanced both the development of fluorescence spectroscopy and its application to the solution of questions in cellular biology. Ever since she received her doctoral degree, Schwille has been occupied with the development of fluorescence spectroscopic methods, with which the function of individual protein molecules can be characterised. Most significantly, she contributed to the development and optimisation of fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS), one of the most elegant, non-invasive methods of recording molecular processes in biological systems. Through a combination of FCS and two-photon excitation, Petra Schwille achieved spectacular insights into cellular mechanisms. In her more recent work, she has tried to establish the FCS method in developmental biology and has already managed to use it in living model organisms such as the zebrafish and the roundworm. Petra Schwille also uses the FCS method to research the interactions between proteins and lipids, for which she has achieved international recognition.

After studying physics and philosophy, Petra Schwille worked with the Nobel Prize recipient Manfred Eigen in Göttingen and received her doctoral degree in Braunschweig. As a postdoctoral researcher she went to Göttingen and to Cornell University. She then returned to Göttingen to the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, where she set up her own independent junior research group. In 2002 she was called to chair Biophysics at the Dresden University of Technology.

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