Lupus Insight Prize

Lupus Insight Prize

Provides prize recognizing a specific significant recent lupus research discovery through the Lupus Insight Prize.

The Lupus Insight Prize is an annual recognition award administered by the Lupus Research Alliance (LRA), a U.S.-based nonprofit that has funded more than $250 million in lupus research since its founding. The prize identifies and honors an outstanding investigator who has made a specific, significant, and recent discovery in a scientific domain relevant to lupus — explicitly not a lifetime achievement award. The award has been given annually since 2013, and international investigators are fully eligible, as evidenced by recipients from Germany, the U.K., Israel, and Canada across the program's history.

The prize is open to individual researchers and those affiliated with universities and research institutions; for-profit entities are not eligible. The discovery being recognized must have occurred within the past five years at the time of nomination. No monetary award amount is published on the LRA's website. Past recipients have included investigators at Brigham and Women's Hospital (2025), Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (2024), The Francis Crick Institute (2023), and Yale University (2022), among others. The 2026 cycle deadline has passed; the next open cycle is 2027.

To compete effectively, applicants should document a clearly defined, recent scientific discovery — not a career body of work — with direct relevance to lupus pathogenesis, diagnosis, or treatment. Nominations proceed through the LRA's scientific review process; inquiries are directed to Maya Bader, PhD (mbader@lupusresearch.org) for scientific questions and Erin McLaughlin (emclaughlin@lupusresearch.org) for administrative matters. Given the prize's international reach and its emphasis on paradigm-shifting insights, strong candidates are researchers whose discoveries have already gained recognition in the lupus or broader autoimmune-disease field within the past five years.