2027 Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences: A $250,000 Biennial Award for Chemical Probes of Biological Systems, With Nominations Closing 3 December 2026

2027 Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences: A $250,000 Biennial Award for Chemical Probes of Biological Systems, With Nominations Closing 3 December 2026

Every two years the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation picks one area of chemistry, announces it in advance, and then spends a year looking for the single person who did the most to build it. That is the Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences: US$250,000, a medal, and a certificate, awarded to one individual. For 2027 the chosen area is chemical probes of biological systems, and nominations close on 3 December 2026.

The topic choice is worth reading closely, because it is narrower than it first appears. The Foundation is looking for contributions to the design and use of molecules that reveal how living systems actually work — probes that have exposed the functions of proteins, glycans, and nucleic acids, the regulation of biological pathways, and the mechanisms of disease. Milan Mrksich of Northwestern University, who chairs the Foundation’s Scientific Affairs Committee, framed it as honouring “an individual who has made major contributions to the design and use of chemical probes for understanding the chemistry of life.”

The Foundation also draws an explicit boundary: this prize is for advances in chemical biology that are distinct from the development of imaging technologies. If a candidate’s reputation rests primarily on instrumentation or an imaging modality rather than on the chemistry of the probe molecules themselves, the fit is weaker than a nominator might assume. That single sentence in the call is the most important scoping signal in the entire announcement.

Key Details

What the Prize Is and How It Differs From a Grant

This is a recognition prize, not a research grant. There is no proposal, no budget, no work plan, and no reporting requirement attached to the money. The Foundation is not buying future research; it is identifying past work whose consequences are already visible in the field. That changes what a nomination has to do. A grant application argues that something should be funded because of what it will produce. A Dreyfus Prize nomination argues that something already happened and that the field would look materially different without it.

The award is made to a single individual. Chemistry increasingly happens in large, interdisciplinary teams, and the Foundation is aware of this — its guidance stresses that where the work sits at a disciplinary boundary, the chemistry contribution of the candidate needs to be clearly identifiable. A nomination that describes a collaborative programme without separating out what this specific person conceived, designed, or drove is likely to struggle, regardless of how important the programme was.

The cadence also matters. Because the prize rotates through topics on a two-year cycle and the topic is set before nominations open, there is no “general excellence” route into it. A superb chemist whose work sits outside chemical probes of biological systems is simply not a 2027 candidate, however strong the record. The right move in that case is to wait for a cycle whose topic fits.

Who Is Eligible — and Who Is Not

Eligibility is unusually open on one axis and unusually restrictive on another.

Open: the prize is international. Candidates may be based at any institution, in any country, in academia or beyond. There is no career-stage requirement, no citizenship requirement, and no requirement that the candidate hold a particular title. There is also no institutional gatekeeping — an individual nominator does not need approval from a dean, a research office, or a limited-submission committee, which is a meaningful difference from many US prizes and awards of comparable value.

Restricted: several categories of people are explicitly excluded from consideration. Current Dreyfus Foundation Directors, Advisors, and consultants are ineligible. Previous Dreyfus Prize winners are ineligible. And Nobel Laureates are ineligible.

That last exclusion is the one most likely to catch nominators by surprise, and it is worth taking seriously before investing effort. The Foundation’s evident intent is to direct a large prize toward people whose contributions have not already been recognised at the highest level — which, in practice, widens the field considerably. When you are drawing up a shortlist for chemical probes of biological systems, the obvious first names are often exactly the ones this rule removes. Work down the list, not across the top of it.

Who Can Nominate

Any person may submit a nomination, with one exception: candidates may not nominate themselves. There is no requirement that the nominator hold a particular position, belong to a particular society, or be based in a particular country. A former collaborator, a departmental colleague, a society officer, or a scientist who has simply used the candidate’s probes in their own work can all serve as nominator.

Because the barrier to nominating is so low, the differentiator is not permission but quality. The Foundation receives nominations from across the world for a single award. A nomination assembled in a weekend by someone with a loose grasp of the candidate’s actual contribution will read very differently from one assembled by someone who understands precisely which papers changed which practices.

If you are considering nominating someone, tell them. Self-nomination is barred, but the candidate can legitimately supply an accurate CV, confirm the correct list of key papers and patents, and flag which of their contributions they consider foundational. That is not gaming the process — it is basic accuracy, and it prevents the common failure where a nominator builds a case around the candidate’s most-cited paper rather than their most consequential one.

The Nomination Package, Item by Item

The Foundation asks for a compact package. Every element has a stated limit, and those limits are the clearest available signal about how the committee reads.

• Online nomination form. Submitted through the Foundation’s website.
• Nomination letter — three pages maximum. This is the core of the case. Three pages is short for a career-spanning argument, which means the letter must choose a thesis rather than survey everything.
• Curriculum vitae — five pages maximum. The CV must include the candidate’s highest degree and the name of their doctoral advisor. This is an easy detail to omit and an avoidable reason for a package to look careless.
• A list of up to ten papers and/or patents relevant to the nomination. Ten is a ceiling, not a target. A tightly chosen six can make a sharper argument than a padded ten.
• A provisional citation — 30 words maximum. One sentence that states what the candidate is being recognised for.
• Up to three letters of support — three pages each, submitted separately as PDFs rather than bundled into the nomination package.

The 30-word provisional citation deserves disproportionate attention relative to its length. It forces the nominator to answer the question the committee will ultimately have to answer: in one sentence, what did this person do? If the citation can only be written vaguely — “for wide-ranging contributions to chemical biology” — that is usually a sign the underlying case has not been sharpened enough. If it can be written concretely — naming the class of probe, the biological problem it opened, and the consequence — the rest of the package tends to write itself.

Timeline and Key Dates

Working backwards from 3 December 2026, the binding constraint is almost never your own letter — it is the three supporting letters. Senior scientists who are good referees are also busy, and a supporter who agrees enthusiastically in September can still be silent in late November. A realistic schedule asks supporters by early October, confirms the assignment in writing, sends them the draft nomination letter and the paper list so their letters complement rather than duplicate it, and sets an internal deadline two weeks before the Foundation’s.

The ceremony detail is worth flagging to a candidate’s institution early if the nomination succeeds: the award presentation is typically held at the winner’s own institution in late September, which means the host department will want lead time to plan a lecture and event.

What the Committee Is Looking For

The prize has a track record that tells you a great deal about the bar. Past recipients include George Whitesides (2009), Tobin Marks (2011), R. Graham Cooks (2013), Krzysztof Matyjaszewski (2015), Michele Parrinello (2017), Robert Langer (2019), James Anderson (2021), Xiaowei Zhuang (2023), and Héctor D. Abruña (2025). These are people associated not with a good result but with a capability that did not exist before them and now exists everywhere — a synthetic method, a polymerisation chemistry, a simulation approach, a measurement technique other laboratories adopted wholesale.

For 2027, translate that standard into the topic. The strongest candidates will be people whose probe chemistry is now used routinely by researchers who have never met them. Evidence of that is concrete and findable: reagents that became commercially available because demand outran what one lab could supply; chemistries that appear in the methods sections of papers in fields far from the originating one; biological questions that were unanswerable before a probe made them tractable, and are now standard.

Write toward that evidence. A nomination letter that says a candidate’s work was “highly influential” is weaker than one that says a specific bioorthogonal or activity-based chemistry became the default tool for interrogating a named class of biomolecule, and names the downstream discoveries it enabled. Chemists on the committee will know the field, so specificity costs nothing and buys credibility.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Nominating an ineligible candidate. Check the Nobel Laureate and previous-winner exclusions before writing a word. This is the single most wasteful error available in this process.

Treating the imaging boundary as soft. The Foundation stated the distinction between chemical probes and imaging technologies deliberately. A candidate whose signature achievement is an imaging platform is a mismatch even if probes were involved along the way. If the case genuinely rests on probe chemistry, say so explicitly and early rather than leaving the committee to infer it.

Blurring individual contribution inside a team. Where the work is interdisciplinary, name what the candidate personally originated. Vague collective credit is fatal for an individual prize.

Padding the ten-item list. A list that mixes three field-defining papers with seven ordinary ones dilutes the first three. Choose the works that carry the argument.

Duplicative letters of support. Three letters that each summarise the same career in the same order add almost nothing. Assign each supporter a distinct angle — one on the chemistry itself, one on adoption and impact in the biological community, one on the candidate’s originality relative to what existed before.

Missing the small formal requirements. Highest degree and doctoral advisor on the CV; letters submitted separately as PDFs; a citation that actually fits in 30 words. None of these decide a prize, but collectively they signal how carefully the nomination was prepared.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I nominate myself? No. Nominations must come from a third party.

Do I need my university’s permission or an internal competition win? No. Institutional approval is not required, and the prize is not run as a limited submission.

Can the prize go to a team or a laboratory? No. It is awarded to an individual.

Is the prize restricted to US scientists? No. Nominations are accepted internationally.

Is there any restriction on how the $250,000 is used? The award is made to the individual as a prize rather than as a project grant, and the Foundation does not attach a research work plan or reporting obligation to it. If the recipient’s institution has its own policies on personal awards, those apply.

What happens if my candidate is not selected in 2027? The topic changes each cycle, so a strong candidate in chemical probes would need to wait for a future cycle with a compatible topic. The material you assemble now — the paper list, the impact evidence, the supporter relationships — is reusable for other major chemistry prizes in the meantime.

When will I hear the outcome? The winner is announced in May 2027.

Official Links and Next Steps

The nomination procedure, current guidelines, and the online form are on the Foundation’s prize page: https://www.dreyfus.org/dreyfus-prize/. The 2027 topic announcement, including the Foundation’s own framing of the scope, is at https://www.dreyfus.org/announcing-the-topic-for-the-2027-dreyfus-prize/.

The Foundation can be reached by telephone at (212) 753-1760, and its office is at 405 Lexington Avenue, Suite 909, New York, NY 10174. A contact email address is published on the Foundation’s website; check the prize page for the current address rather than relying on a third-party listing.

If you have a candidate in mind, three steps are worth taking this month, well ahead of the December deadline. Confirm eligibility against the exclusion list. Draft the 30-word provisional citation first and see whether it holds up — if it does not, the case needs more work before you approach supporters. Then approach three supporters with distinct vantage points, and give each of them a specific brief rather than a general request. A nomination built that way is a genuinely different document from one assembled in the final fortnight, and for a prize awarded to one person every two years, that difference is the whole contest.