Anna Monika Prize awarded to Prof. Rainer Rupprecht

For his studies on neurosteroids and the functional modulation of ion channels in neurons, Max Planck Fellow Rainer Rupprecht has been awarded the Anna Monika Prize. The other prize, as decided in 2011, went to Prof. Eric Nestler for his merits in more than 20 years of excellent depression research. The awards ceremony took place on November 24, during the 2012 Annual Meeting of the German Association for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy in Berlin.
Since 1994, the Anna Monika Foundation has awarded prizes to scientists for outstanding research activities on the biological causes and functional disorders of depression.

Rainer Rupprecht, Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich and Director of the Clinic and Polyclinic of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Regensburg, has been awarded the second Anna Monika Prize for his research work entitled "Allosteric modulation of ligand-gated ion channels as a novel principle for the treatment of depression and anxiety”.

Rainer Rupprecht was born in Bayreuth in 1961 and studied medicine at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. After having done both clinical work and research at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry from 1990 to 1996 and at the Clinic of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy of the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich from 1998 to 2007, Rainer Rupprecht became Director of the University of Regensburg's Clinic and Polyclinic of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the Regensburg District Hospital in 2011. In 2007, he was appointed Max Planck Fellow. Since then, he has been leading a research group at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich.