Dirk Hellhammer Award

Renamed in 2021 in honor of psychoneuroendocrinology pioneer Dirk Hellhammer (1947–2018).

Lars Schwabe, Ph.D.

Dr. Lars Schwabe has been awarded the 2026 Dirk Hellhammer Award from the International Society of Psychoneuroendocrinology (ISPNE) which has recognized a distinguished line of young investigators since 2000. In 2021, the award was renamed to honor Dirk Hellhammer (1947-2018) who was a pioneer in the field of psychoneuroendocrinology, contributing some of most important and enduring progress, from the Trier Social Stress Test to the characterization of the cortisol awakening response. Dr. Schwabe states, “This award is a profound honor, recognizing two decades of my work at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and psychoneuroendocrinology. It validates the importance of bridging basic science with clinical applications.” 

The Dirk Hellhammer award recognizes Dr. Schwabe for his work in Psychoneuroendocrinology on how stress and major stress mediators shape cognition, emphasizing all interdisciplinary components of PsychoNeuroEndocrinology with work spanning from behavioral experiments and pharmacological manipulations to brain stimulation (e.g., TMS or tDCS) and functional neuroimaging (e.g., fMRI, EEG, MEG and fNIRS). The society has long benefited from Dr. Schwabe’s methodological contribution to the field in which he noted that the efficacy of the cold pressor task was enhanced when it involved elements of social evaluative threat from researcher presence. Dr. Schwabe and colleagues systematically developed the Socially Evaluated Cold Pressor Task which has become a staple stressor in the field. Dr. Schwabe’s neurobiological works revealed that the amygdala orchestrates a stress-induced transition from hippocampal or a shift from flexible, cognitive memory systems underpinned by the hippocampus toward more rigid, habitual memory underpinned by the dorsal striatum and in an interaction between glucocorticoids and noradrenergic arousal. Dr. Schwabe’s work has demonstrated that this stress mechanism impacts many aspects of memory such as consolidation, retrieval and flexibility.

Dr. Schwabe received his PhD at the Institute for Psychobiology at the University of Trier, Germany under the mentorship of Hartmut Schächinger and then habilitation in 2012 at the Ruhr-University Bochum with the thesis “stress effects on memory: quantity and quality”. Since 2020, Dr. Schwabe has served as professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He has published over 160 peer-reviewed articles with an H-index of 66 and over 16,000 citations. Dr. Schwabe’s 2026 publication in Psychoneuroendocrinology, 1 “stress, memory, and the predictive brain” is a perspective article that proposes that stress enhances memory for stressful episodes, but that encoding all elements of a stressful encounter would be impossible, overloading mental capacity. Instead, memory formation is boosted when stressors include unexpectedness or prediction error as these cues require the body to update mnemonic models. This Predictive Brain Hypothesis is exciting as it is likely to advance the field towards targeting mismatches between expected and actual outcomes as key determinants of stress.

On the importance of receiving this award, Dr. Schwabe notes “ISPNE has always been close to my heart. One of the first meetings I ever attended was the annual ISPNE meeting, at a time when I was still a PhD student. My research lies at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and endocrinology, and therefore fits naturally with the society. My work has also been shaped by several prominent figures within ISPNE. During my PhD in Trier, I had the pleasure of meeting Dirk Hellhammer, and I am very aware of the impact he has had on the field. I am delighted and deeply honored to receive this award, one that bears his name.” ISPNE shares this enthusiasm and welcomes the chance to see this wonderful scholar continue to build upon the Predictive Brain Hypothesis as collectively we probe mechanistically the ecological factors that make stressors stressful.

1 Schwabe, L. (2026). Stress, memory, and the predictive brain–2026 Dirk Hellhammer Award. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 107975.