Lars Velten, a Group Leader at the CRG, has been selected as one of seven researchers worldwide to receive the 2026 Vallee Scholar award. This honor from the Vallee Foundation provides $400,000 over four years to support bold, curiosity-driven research with the potential to transform human health.
Velten joins six other researchers selected this year from institutions including Harvard Medical School, MIT, Stanford University, the Weizmann Institute of Science, EPFL, and the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. The Vallee Foundation annually invites leading research institutions globally to nominate one candidate. The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST), as one of the invited institutions, asked its community centers to put forward eligible candidates, who were then assessed by internationally recognized experts in biomedicine. Velten was chosen as BIST’s nominee.
Since establishing his independent group at the CRG in 2020, Velten has built an internationally recognized research program at the intersection of stem cell biology, gene regulation, and machine learning. His ongoing work investigates clonal stem cell dynamics as a determinant of human health.
His laboratory recently developed EPI-Clone, a method that reads naturally occurring changes in DNA methylation as barcodes to trace stem cell clones without genetic engineering. Published in Nature in 2025, this work traced hundreds of clonal trajectories across mouse and human blood, finding that stem cell lineage diversity narrows sharply with age.
“"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."
Velten studied molecular cell biology and cancer biology at Heidelberg University and the German Cancer Research Center, completing his PhD summa cum laude at EMBL. He received the Otto Schmeil Award for his doctoral work and is an EMBO Young Investigator.
Velten follows in the footsteps of Elvan Böke, an ICREA Research Professor at the CRG, who was named a Vallee Scholar in 2023. Since 2013, the Vallee Foundation has committed over $23 million through the program.
