image: David Engblom, Professor of Neurobiology at Linköping University.
Credit: Anna Nilsen/Linköping University
David Engblom, Professor of Neurobiology at Linköping University, Sweden, is awarded the 2026 Onkel Adam Prize for outstanding research at the Faculty of Medicine at Linköping University. He researches the role of the brain in making us feel ill in various medical conditions.
Try to remember how you felt the last time you had a cold or had the flu. Were you a little depressed, avoiding the company of others and having a diffuse sense of sickness? Probably. This type of depression is due to the immune system being activated by the inflammation in your body, and also occurs in lifelong conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel diseases. But why? David Engblom has devoted his research career to finding out how inflammation in the body affects our brain function and how we behave.
“It’s very easy to link this to human suffering, which you’d want to alleviate. Research can contribute to knowledge needed for treatment and care. The brain is also unusually interesting when it comes to figuring out how it works,” says David Engblom.
Becoming a researcher was a total coincidence, he claims. He studied medicine and began doing research halfway into the programme. The idea was to go back to studying after a while, but one thing led to another. And that was lucky. According to the jury’s citation, he “represents a research achievement of exceptional scientific excellence which has resulted in a series of prestigious awards and grants.”
“On a day like this, I’m very happy that I became a scientist. I think you should keep jumping at opportunities throughout life. If you have very rigid ideas from the beginning about what to do, you might miss a lot of opportunities that pop up along the way,” says David Engblom.
In addition to his success in research, David Engblom has also been awarded as a teacher at the university. He teaches mostly on the medical programme he once attended. The medical students have awarded him the “Kandidat Kork” teacher award no less than five times.
“We’re delighted that David Engblom is awarded the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences’ largest and most prestigious research award. In addition to outstandingly fine research, David also makes significant contributions in education and collegial contexts,” says Lena Jonasson, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Linköping University, who led the award committee’s nomination work.
The value of the award this year is SEK 400,000 and is given to David Engblom as a private individual. He himself highlights the doctoral students, research colleagues and students who have worked with the research over the years:
“Research is in many respects teamwork. At the beginning of your career as a researcher, you’re actively involved in the experiments and doing practical research work, but my role now is more like coaching a football team. I’m no longer the one who scores the goals; the research team does.”
The Onkel Adam Prize
The Onkel Adam Prize was established in 2020 through a donation to the Jubilee Foundation at Linköping University by Onkel Adam’s descendant Bengt Normann. The purpose of the prize is to promote medical research at the university while honouring the memory of Onkel Adam. Onkel Adam was the well-known pen name used by the physician, author, publicist and politician Carl Anton Wetterbergh who lived in Linköping in the 19th century.