September 18, 2026
Rasmus Nielsen, Professor of Statistics and Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley, has been awarded the 2026 Balzan Prize for Molecular Evolution alongside Ziheng Yang of University College London. The prize recognizes their pioneering and complementary contributions to molecular evolution, combining statistical theory, computational methods, and genomic analysis to reveal how natural selection shapes genes and populations. Nielsen and Yang have also developed widely used tools that have advanced the study of evolutionary adaptation.