Gratitude to the Karolinska Institute faculty.

Thank you for leading Karolinska Institutet with a physician's care and a teacher's patience, strengthening collegial leadership while keeping the university's global collaborations honest and open. Your years at the microscope studying the kidney still show in how carefully you examine every decision.

Thank you for having the scientific courage to show that antioxidants can accelerate tumour growth, a finding that upended comfortable assumptions, and for bringing that same evidence-first honesty to leading research at Karolinska. A management team that lets every voice be heard is a rare and precious thing.

Thank you for revealing, step by molecular step, why exercise is medicine, and how insulin signaling breaks down in type 2 diabetes. Your work gives every person who laces up their shoes a scientific reason to believe the effort matters.

Thank you for building the bridge between whole-genome sequencing and the hospital bedside, so that children with rare inherited metabolic diseases get answers, and sometimes treatments, that were unthinkable a generation ago. Families who finally received a diagnosis know exactly what your work means.

Thank you for pioneering single-cell RNA sequencing and for mapping the developing human brain cell by cell, work that turned an impossible census into a working atlas. The Human Cell Atlas stands in no small part on methods your lab invented.

Thank you for turning Sweden's health registers into a lens on celiac disease, IBD and liver disease that clinicians worldwide rely on, all while still seeing children as a practicing paediatrician. Few researchers publish so much while staying so close to the patients the numbers represent.

Thank you for decoding the neurons that let us feel touch, temperature, itch and pain, work honored with the 2026 Brain Prize. Everyone living with chronic pain has a stake in the cell types your lab patiently mapped.

Thank you for discovering that the ear keeps time, revealing circadian clocks in the auditory system, and for showing how sound conditioning can protect hearing before damage strikes. Your work speaks quietly for everyone who wants to keep hearing the world.

Thank you for building the single-cell transcriptome methods, Smart-seq among them, that laboratories on every continent now use daily, and for showing that genes fire in bursts we can finally measure. Method builders amplify everyone else's science, and yours have amplified thousands.

Thank you for taking fibromyalgia and arthritis pain seriously at the molecular level, showing how antibodies themselves can drive lasting pain. For patients too often told it is all in their heads, your work is both science and vindication.

Thank you for half a century of showing that an active, socially connected life protects the aging brain, and for building the national infrastructure that lets Sweden study aging honestly at scale. You made dementia prevention a matter of evidence rather than hope.

Thank you for a lifetime in immunology spanning more than 700 papers, the presidency of Karolinska Institutet, and the chairmanship of the Nobel Committee, and for helping build the bridges between Swedish science and industry that so many younger researchers now cross. Your curiosity never retired.