The 2026 Richard Perham Prize winner: Angela M. Gronenborn

Abstract

The Richard Perham prize was established in 2016 to honor exceptional contributions to The FEBS Journal. We are extremely proud to announce that the recipient of this year's Richard Perham prize is NMR pioneer and long‐standing Editorial Board member, Professor Angela M. Gronenborn. Please join us in congratulating Angela and in thanking her for her tireless service to The FEBS Journal.

The Richard Perham prize was established in 2016 to honor exceptional contributions to The FEBS Journal. We are extremely proud to announce that the recipient of this year's Richard Perham prize is NMR pioneer and long‐standing Editorial Board member, Professor Angela M. Gronenborn. Please join us in congratulating Angela and in thanking her for her tireless service to The FEBS Journal.

The Richard Perham prize was established in 2016 to honor exceptional contributions to The FEBS Journal [1]. Since its inception, the prize was awarded to the first and senior authors of an outstanding research article published in the journal, chosen by the Editorial Board. The winners were invited to speak at the annual FEBS congress, where they received their award. However, starting this year, the Richard Perham prize will undergo an important evolution. From 2026, the prize will honor scientists who have made exceptional scientific contributions, in addition to significant service to The FEBS Journal or the wider FEBS community, much like the extraordinary biochemist and former Editor‐in‐Chief of The FEBS Journal after whom the prize is named. Thus, the new iteration of the Richard Perham Prize will now recognize outstanding career contributions rather than a single paper.

We are extremely proud to announce that the recipient of this year's Richard Perham prize is NMR pioneer and long‐standing Editorial Board member, Professor Angela M. Gronenborn.

Angela M. Gronenborn is the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Rosalind Franklin Professor and a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Structural Biology at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. She completed her PhD in organic chemistry at the University of Cologne, Germany. Her career then took her to London, Munich, Bethesda (USA), and, in 2006, to Pittsburgh. At the time of writing this Editorial, Angela is spending time in Munich, where she is a Hans Fischer Senior Fellow at the TUM Institute of Advanced Studies.

Angela's interest in science started at a very young age, during her early school years in Cologne, when she developed a profound love of mathematics. At the time, women were strongly discouraged from pursuing a career in mathematics, so she chose physics and chemistry for her degrees at the University of Cologne. During her PhD, her brother Bruno Gronenborn, a distinguished molecular biologist in his own right, piqued her interest in DNA–protein interactions. This familial intellectual partnership helped Angela decide to use NMR to solve the structures of DNA–protein complexes, a technical impossibility at the time.

Readers will probably not be surprised to learn that Angela actually succeeded in achieving this. Following her PhD, she undertook a postdoctoral position at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), Medical Research Council, in Mill Hill, London, and then stayed on at NIMR as a member of the scientific staff in the division of molecular pharmacology and physical biochemistry. In 1984, she took a position as head of the biological NMR group at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich. Four years later, she relocated her group to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, where she served as chief of the structural biology section.

In her decades‐long career, Angela and her team developed boundary‐pushing NMR techniques to solve the structures of many challenging biological macromolecules and complexes. These span cytokines, chemokines, transcription factors and their complexes, and a number of HIV‐related proteins, including the conical capsid that protects the HIV genome. Angela's laboratory combines NMR, crystallography and cryo‐EM in integrative structural biology studies. Her fundamental discoveries are foundational for translational advances in biomedical sciences.

A passionate advocate for fundamental discovery research and scientific collaboration [2], Angela has trained more than 50 graduate students and post‐doctoral fellows, and has authored more than 500 peer‐reviewed publications. Although we do not have the space to celebrate each of these, we would like to highlight a 1992 publication Angela co‐authored with the late Richard Perham, in which her techniques solved the structure of, in Angela's words, “a protein domain in one of Richard's big enzyme machines” [3]. When notified about being awarded the 2026 Richard Perham Prize, Angela reminded us of how meaningful their connection was and how much the prize means to her.

She has received numerous awards, served as president of key professional societies, such as the Biophysical Society [4], and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (USA), the Norwegian Academy of Arts and Letters, the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Angela has also been a long‐standing member of the editorial board of The FEBS Journal [5]. In this role, spanning over 20 years, she has given truly outstanding service to the journal. We are therefore delighted to announce that Angela was chosen as this year's winner of The FEBS Journal Perham Prize—a truly worthy recipient.

Angela will deliver her prize lecture at the 50th FEBS Congress in Maastricht, the Netherlands, on Tuesday, 7 July 2026. We look forward to attending her talk, to congratulate her in person for her contributions to NMR, structural biology, to our journal, and to FEBS [6]. Please join us in congratulating Angela, and in thanking her for her tireless service to The FEBS Journal.