Prize Winners

With a PhD from the University of Cambridge, he is currently a senior principal investigator at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, ​​where he has spent most of his scientific career. He has been an ICREA professor since 2009 and is one of the most prominent international figures in the fields of genetics, systems biology, and functional genomics.

His research focuses on understanding how mutations alter the function of genes and proteins, how they give rise to human diseases, and how they can be corrected or prevented. Throughout his career, he has made fundamental contributions to understanding the relationship between the genome and the biological processes that determine health and disease.

Among his most significant achievements is the development of pioneering methods for the massive analysis of the effect of thousands of mutations in proteins and RNA, generating the largest existing maps of how genetic alterations affect cellular functions. His work has identified essential mechanisms involved in numerous hereditary diseases and has opened new avenues for the development of personalized treatments. He has also been a pioneer in the study of the allosteric regulation of proteins,
constructing the first comprehensive maps of these molecular mechanisms that control
protein activity and which constitute one of the main targets for the design of new
drugs. Furthermore, his research has contributed decisive advances to the understanding
of neurodegenerative diseases, human genetic variability, and the
epigenetic mechanisms that allow the transmission of biological information between generations.
Author of more than one hundred scientific publications, including numerous articles in
Nature, Science, and Cell, he has received important international recognition and is a member
of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, the British Academy of Medical Sciences, and the
European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO).

The jury of the Rei Jaume I Prizes has unanimously decided to award Ben Lehner in Biomedical Research for addressing fundamental biological and human genetics, using techniques ranging from large scale mutagenesis to AI, he developed the first complete map of allosteric regulation of proteins, he showed how disease mutations result in protein instability and that incomplete penetrance of mutations results form random variation of gene expression in development.