Martin van der Laan, who was awarded an EMBO Fellowship in 2004, received the Karl-Freudenberg-Preis 
awarded by the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften .
This is an annual award for young scientists working in the fields of chemistry or biology, endowed with 6,000 euro.
The academy awarded his work on the reconstitution of membrane insertion of proteins with cleavable signal sequences into the inner mitochondrial membrane, which was published last year in Nature Cell Biology (van der Laan et al., 2007, Motor-free mitochondrial presequence translocase drives membrane integration of preproteins, Nat. Cell. Biol. 9, 1152-1159 ).
This work was done at the Institute for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Freiburg, where Martin is still as a group leader in a collaborative research center (Sonderforschungsbereich 746, www.sfb746.uni-freiburg.de ), in the group of Prof. Nikolaus Pfanner.