Stanford University has shared a video of Karl Deisseroth telling his two daughters and one of his sons he has won a Nobel prize in medicine.

Deisseroth spent hours fielding congratulatory calls on Monday after learning he had won the prize for helping to open a field of brain science called optogenetics. But it wasn't long before the California scientist asked for a break for a more ordinary task: he needed to make school lunches for his children who were asleep in the family home in Stanford where he had been speaking to journalists and wellwishers in the middle of the night.

Deisseroth, 54, shares the prize with two researchers in Germany for their work in optogenetics, a field that combines light with genes to switch neurons on and off in living brains

• Nobel prize in medicine 2026 awarded for research into mysteries of brain