David Engblom, Professor of Neurobiology at Linköping University, Sweden, is awarded the 2026 Onkel Adam Award for outstanding research at Linköping University School of Medicine. He investigates the brain’s role in making us feel sick in various medical conditions.
Try to remember how you felt the last time you had a cold or flu. Have you been a bit depressed, avoiding the company of others and had a pervasive sense of illness? Probably. This type of depression is caused by the immune system being activated by inflammation in your body and also occurs in lifelong conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease. But why? David Engblom has dedicated his research career to discovering how inflammation in the body affects how our brains function and how we behave.
It is very easy to associate this with human suffering, which you would like to alleviate. Research can contribute to the knowledge needed for treatment and care. The brain is also extraordinarily interesting when it comes to understanding how it works.”
David Engblom, Professor of Neurobiology, Linköping University
Becoming a researcher was a complete coincidence, he claims. He studied medicine and started doing research halfway through the program. The idea was to go back to studying after a while, but one thing led to another. And that was lucky. According to the jury’s report, it “represents a research achievement of outstanding scientific excellence that has resulted in a number of prestigious awards and grants.”
“On a day like this, I’m very glad I became a scientist. I think you have to keep jumping at opportunities throughout life. If you have very rigid ideas from the beginning about what to do, you might miss a lot of opportunities that will appear along the way,” says David Engblom.
In addition to his research success, David Engblom has also been awarded as a university teacher. He teaches primarily in the medical program he once attended. Medical students have awarded him the “Kandidat Kork” professor award at least five times.
“We are delighted that David Engblom has been awarded the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences’ largest and most prestigious research award. In addition to outstanding research, David also makes significant contributions to education and collegial contexts,” says Lena Jonasson, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Linköping University, who led the work of the Linköping Prize Committee.
The value of the prize this year is SEK 400,000 and is awarded to David Engblom as a private individual. He points to the PhD students, research fellows and students who have worked with the research over the years:
“Research is in many ways teamwork. At the beginning of your career as a researcher, you are actively involved in experiments and doing hands-on research, but my role now is more like coaching a football team. I am no longer the one who scores the goals, but the research team.”
The Onkel Adam Award
The Onkel Adam Award was established in 2020 through a donation to the Jubilee Foundation at Linköping University by Onkel Adam’s descendant, Bengt Normann. The purpose of the award is to promote medical research at the university while honoring the memory of Onkel Adam. Onkel Adam was the well-known pseudonym used by the doctor, writer, journalist and politician Carl Anton Wetterbergh who lived in Linköping in the 19th century.
