The CRG Group Leader is one of seven researchers worldwide to receive the award, which provides $400,000 over four years to support bold, curiosity-driven research with the potential to transform human health.
Lars Velten, Group Leader at the CRG, has been named a 2026 Vallee Scholar by the Vallee Foundation. He joins six other researchers selected this year, based at Harvard Medical School, MIT, Stanford University, the Weizmann Institute of Science, EPFL and the Institute of Science and Technology Austria.
The Vallee Foundation does not accept open applications. Each year, it invites a small number of leading research institutions worldwide to nominate one candidate. As one of the institutions invited for the 2026 edition, BIST asked its community centres to put forward eligible candidates, who were assessed by two internationally recognised experts in biomedicine. Velten was selected as BIST’s nominee.
The Vallee Foundation then evaluates the nominees, placing as much emphasis on a candidate’s potential as on the proposed research itself.
Since establishing his independent group at the CRG in 2020, Velten has built an internationally recognised research programme at the intersection of stem cell biology, gene regulation and machine learning.
Velten’s ongoing work investigates clonal stem cell dynamics as a determinant of human health. His group develops functional genomic technologies to study how blood stem cells renew themselves, how blood ages, and how both processes go wrong in leukaemia.
His laboratory recently developed EPI-Clone, a method that reads naturally occurring changes in DNA methylation as barcodes, making it possible to trace stem cell clones without genetic engineering. Published in Nature in 2025 with Alejo Rodríguez-Fraticelli’s group at IRB Barcelona, the work traced hundreds of clonal trajectories across mouse and human blood and found that the diversity of stem cell lineages narrows sharply with age, with a handful of clones coming to dominate. Earlier in his career, Velten used single-cell RNA sequencing to overturn the textbook model of how human blood stem cells differentiate.
“It is a great honor to be named Vallee Scholar, and to join this community of scientists pursuing bold and unusual projects at the intersection between basic research and human health,” said Velten on receiving the news.
Velten studied molecular cell biology and cancer biology at Heidelberg University and the German Cancer Research Center, and completed his PhD summa cum laude at EMBL. He received the Otto Schmeil Award for his doctoral work, is an EMBO Young Investigator, and holds an ERC Starting Grant.
He follows Elvan Böke, ICREA Research Professor at the CRG, who was named a Vallee Scholar in 2023. Since 2013 the Vallee Foundation has committed more than $23 million through the programme.
