Professor Melina Schuh is a German biochemist. Her research has made a significant contribution to understanding the development of mammalian oocytes, particularly how errors in chromosome segregation can arise and lead to miscarriages or reduced fertility. She established methods that enabled the process of meiosis to be recorded in living mouse oocytes at high resolution for the first time. Building on this, she developed studies to investigate meiosis in living human oocytes.
Meiosis, also known as reduction division, is a fundamental process of sexual reproduction. It leads, through several stages, to the formation of germ cells, that is, the production of eggs and sperm. During this process, pairs of chromosomes are reduced to a single, “haploid” set of chromosomes and to individual chromatids. Schuh focused in particular on the role of the so-called spindle, which forms during meiosis to separate the chromosomes. She discovered that in humans this spindle apparatus is more prone to errors than in other mammals, resulting in chromosomes being incorrectly segregated more frequently during oocyte development—especially as a woman’s age increases. Schuh’s findings may help to improve the success rates of in vitro fertilisation for people wishing to have children.
Melina Schuh studied biochemistry at the University of Bayreuth. After completing her doctorate at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg and carrying out research at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, she has been Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen since 2016, now the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences. In addition, in 2025 she founded Ovo Labs GmbH, a company focused on helping people fulfil their wish to have children. Melina Schuh has received numerous awards for her research, including the Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year 2025, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 2019 and the EMBO Gold Medal of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2018. In 2019, Leopoldina elected her to the section Genetics/Molecular Biology and Cell Biology.
The Carus Medal was established on the occasion of the 50th professorial anniversary of the 13th President of Leopoldina, Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869), and was awarded for the first time in 1896. It honours outstanding scientific discoveries or research achievements by scientists in a field represented within Leopoldina. Previous recipients include Prof. Dr Jacques Monod (1965), who in the same year was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; Prof. Dr Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (1989), who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1995; and Prof. Dr Stefan Hell (2013), who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry the following year. Since 1961, the medal has been associated with the Carus Prize, endowed with €5,000 and funded by the City of Schweinfurt—the founding location of Leopoldina.
Photo: from left: Bettina Rockenbach, President of the Leopoldina; Carus Prize winner Melina Schuh; and Ralf Hofmann, Mayor of the City Schweinfurt