Life at the pivot point

Within a few years of winning a Lister Prize, recent Fellows have gone on to claim major accolades: Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists, the Leverhulme Research Leadership Award, the EMBO Gold Medal to name a few. Lister Fellows and Scientific Committee members suggest that such success has less to do with its prestige than with the quiet mechanics of flexible, trust-based funding.

Inflexion

Ask members of the Lister’s own Scientific Committee about how they spot outstanding future biomedical research leaders, and the first answer is a caveat. “Yes, so many of our Fellows are on the cusp, they’re really impressive,” says Professor Anne Rosser, chair of the Scientific Committee, “but there are also many people who are equally as good who we just don’t pick up at that point.” It’s an honest admission that the Lister Prize has some selection bias built in; it is consistently good at finding the right people to benefit from the Lister Prize boost, but the pool of outstanding scientists is so much larger. “Applicants should never be disheartened if they’re not selected as a Prize winner,” Anne insists. “There are so many incredibly talented scientists out there. We see but a small fraction. And of those who apply, we can’t fund them all in spite of their calibre.”

Still, it is easy to be overawed by Prize winners’ credentials. Dr Kelly Nguyen (Lister Prize 2025) applied when her five-year-old lab was “just starting to pick up momentum.” She’d published three or four influential papers, and several exciting research directions were emerging from her group's work. This gave her enough confidence to apply for a Lister Prize despite still feeling “quite new” in her field. Nevertheless, less than 12 months after receiving her Prize, she was also crowned winner of the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in Life Sciences.

For Dr Srikanth Ramaswamy (Lister Prize 2023), one key post-Prize achievement looked a little different. In 2026 he was awarded a £1.2 million Leverhulme Research Leadership Award for an interdisciplinary programme of innovative research to advance brain-inspired AI, building on his Lister Fellowship. He is categorical about how his Fellowship has given him a tremendous competitive advantage. “The Lister Prize was really a shot in the arm,” he says. “My career was just taking off when it came. It seems unlikely that many of the other recognitions I’ve received since would have come in had it not been for the Lister.”

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It seems unlikely that many of the other recognitions I’ve received since would have come in had it not been for the Lister._”

Srikanth Ramaswamy

Catalytic effects: flexibility, pilots, talent

The Lister Prize is a highly prestigious Fellowship. Previous winners include Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz (current chair of UKRI), Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys (discovered DNA fingerprinting) and Professor Robin May (Chief Scientific Officer at the UK Health Security Agency). More historical figures include Nobel laureate Arthur Harden and Leslie Collier, who developed the free-drying method used to produce the heat-stable vaccine that enabled global eradication of smallpox.

Fellows describe a “visibility effect” that a Lister Fellowship brings. Professor Chris Stewart (2021 Lister Prize) recalls a senior colleague saying “Don’t steal Chris!” when he was presented his Prize at the university. He was also told the Prize acted as “a litmus test for success” to his leadership development.

The reputation and prestige arising from the impressive roll call of Lister community members is not in dispute. But what does the real work, Fellows agree, is this: fully flexible funding that many conventional grants do not allow.

Chris puts it plainly: “Most of the funding I have allows me limited flexibility. I have to do exactly what I outlined in my proposal; deviation involves negotiation. With the Lister Prize, though, that’s maybe a quick email. There’s just free rein to move stuff around, invest in response to scientific findings and circumstances as they emerge.”

Chris says that small, reactive spending can snowball. He describes buying sample-collection kits within days to seize a fleeting opportunity within an understudied Parkinson’s cohort in Africa. “There are all these little opportunities for very small amounts that the Lister Prize lets you pursue. I think it can enable massive wins down the line.” For Chris, his speculative sample collection became the seed for a multi-million-pound data-generation project that had nothing to do with his original Lister proposal.

Srikanth agrees in the power of pilot data. His first Leverhulme application was rejected for lacking an experimental track record; the Lister Prize let him generate exactly the data his Leverhulme proposal needed. “The Lister enabled me to undertake all these experiments that I had articulated in my initial Leverhulme proposal that didn’t get through triage... the Lister was a saviour.” Kelly Nguyen used the same logic to win her own award, building her application around data a summer student had produced only weeks before the Prize application deadline. For researchers wanting to pivot or pursue new directions, the Lister solves a real chicken-and-egg conundrum: conventional funders want proof you can do the work before they’ll pay for it. The Lister Prize helps researchers take this risk.

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For researchers wanting to pivot or pursue new directions, the Lister solves a real chicken-and-egg conundrum: conventional funders want proof you can do the work before they’ll pay for it. The Lister Prize helps researchers take this risk._”

Lister Prize funding also helps Fellows hold on to exceptional talent too. Chris funded a technician who proved to be so capable that he channelled much of his Lister funds to support her PhD studentship, and her subsequent postdoc. Srikanth’s Leverhulme award now pays the salaries of people originally hired through his Lister Fellowship, freeing the remaining Lister funds to underwrite someone else’s path to their own fellowship. Dr Tanmay Bharat (2021 Lister Prize) hired staff so he could develop breakthrough cryo-ET methods “not possible without the Lister Prize.”

Take the litmus test

The catalytic effect is subtle and causality is hard to determine, Chris candidly admits. “I’d stop short of saying the Lister is the only reason why people go on to succeed. They were probably always going to do well. But the Lister certainly helps them on the way.”

Yes, the subsequent honours are very real: Kelly’s and Chris’s Blavatnik Awards, Srikanth’s Leverhulme award and R.G. Bannister Prize, Tanmay’s Colworth Medal (five Lister Fellow winners since 2019), Fleming Prize (2023) and EMBO Gold Medal. This shortlist is just a small sample of the prestigious awards and prizes that Lister Fellows gain soon after becoming Lister Prize winners.

So how does the Scientific Committee do so well at selecting outstanding scientists at the point in their careers when the Prize could be so transformational? There’s no checklist, but some careful self-reflection can help you to see if you are at that critical inflexion point from which the Lister Prize will help you spread your wings and soar.