2025 Anton Lang Memorial Award winners announced
Anne Steensma, Deepak Bhandari and Maureen Hanson are this year's Anton Lang awardees.
Graduate student Anne Steensma and postdoctoral researcher Deepak Bhandari have been awarded the 2025 Anton Lang Memorial Awards. This year’s lecturer was Maureen Hanson from Cornell University.
The Anton Lang Memorial Fund was established in honor of the founding director of the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory, or PRL, who passed away in 1996. Proceeds from the fund go towards annually supporting the Anton Lang Memorial Lecture and recognizing a graduate student and a postdoctoral research associate who exemplify the research excellence, ideas, dedication and vision of Anton Lang.
“It is always a pleasure leading the annual award ceremony to honor the memory of the first PRL director, Anton Lang,” said Christoph Benning, the current director of the PRL. “I would like to congratulate the 2025 awardees for their outstanding accomplishments and wish both all the best for their future careers. I also congratulate Maureen Hanson for her recognition as the 2025 Anton Lang Lecturer. She gave a captivating presentation on carbon fixation by plants and future engineering avenues to improve plant productivity in a changing environment."
Anne Steensma
Anne Steensma is the 2025 recipient of the Anton Lang Graduate Student Award. She is a co-advised by Berkley Walker and Yair Shachar-Hill.
Walker and Shachar-Hill jointly nominated Steensma for this award. In the nomination letter states: “During [Steensma’s] time as an MSU graduate student, she has shown remarkable research excellence, as evidenced by the novel findings of her work, and ability to independently develop research directions.”
Steensma’s research has revolved around the thermophilic red alga Cyanidioschyzon merolae. Her first paper revealed that C. merolae must have a carbon-concentrating mechanism, which centralizes CO2 around rubisco for photosynthesis. In further work, Steesma co-led a team of interdisciplinary researchers to devise mathematical models to simulate the CCM of C. merolae.
“I feel very privileged to have been chosen for this year’s Anton Lang award,” Steensma said. “I’m especially grateful to my advisors, Dr. Berkley Walker and Dr. Yair Shachar-Hill; their nomination of me for this award is just one of the many ways that they’ve believed in me and supported me throughout my graduate studies. It’s encouraging to be recognized for my efforts to offer new perspectives on how organisms make their living in challenging environments. I deeply appreciate the collaborators, lab mates, mentors, friends and family members who have joined me on this journey.”
Deepak Bhandari
Deepak Bhandari is a postdoctoral researcher in Federica Brandizzi’s lab and is the recipient of the 2025 Anton Lang Research Associate Award.
“Deepak’s work exemplifies the research excellence, vision, and dedication to plant science that the Anton Lang Award celebrates,” Brandizzi wrote in her letter nominating Bhandari for the award. “His innovative contributions to the cell biology of plant immunity, combined with his leadership and collaborative spirit, make him an outstanding candidate for this honor.”
While at the PRL, Bhandari has made groundbreaking contributions to the understanding of plant-microbe interactions and intracellular trafficking. His work found that TGNap1, a trans-Golgi Network-associated protein, plays a key role in transporting antimicrobial proteins out of plant cells. This work was published in Nature Communications and led to a follow-up essay in BioEssays.
“Receiving the Anton Lang Award is a tremendous honor, and I’m truly grateful to be recognized by my peer-community with this award,” Bhandari said. “It’s especially meaningful given the illustrious scientists who have received this award in the past - many of whom have been my source of inspiration, and to be acknowledged alongside such inspiring peers is humbling.
“Also, I would like to mention the mentorship and interdisciplinary collaboration that enabled my work—both have played a significant role in shaping my approach to science.”
Maureen Hanson
The 2025 Anton Lang Memorial Lecture was given by Maureen Hanson, Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Plant Molecular Biology at Cornell University. Her talk was titled “Engineering Carbon Fixation.”
Her talk covered two major areas of her research. The first was the expression of tobacco rubisco enzymes in E. coli, allowing for rapid testing of mutant forms for improved properties.
The second used computational methods to predict how rubisco would have operated 25-30 million years ago. By looking at ancient rubisco, the researchers are able to see how ancient plants would have survived under the environmental conditions of the time.
“I was honored by the invitation to speak at a memorial lecture for famous plant physiologist Anton Lang, whose work I had first studied as an undergraduate,” Hanson said. “I enjoyed meeting with current Michigan State researchers who are continuing his tradition of excellence.”
