News

Joshua Kaste and Xinyu Fu have been awarded the 2024 Anton Lang Memorial Award. The lecture was given by Robert Last.

Graduate students Xiaotong Jiang and Bailey Kleven are the 2024 recipients of the Keegstra and Thomashow Travel Awards.

Leah Johnson is the 2023 recipient of the Kende Award, which acknowledges the best doctoral dissertation in plant sciences at Michigan State University over the last two years.

Five researchers and professors from Michigan State University, including the PRL's Gregg Howe, have been recognized in the “2023 Highly Cited Researchers” list, a ranking organized annually by Clarivate Analytics.

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory (PRL) a $12 million Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy Sciences competitive renewal grant to continue research in photosynthetic energy capture, conversion and storage. The three-year grant (2023-2026) will allow PRL scientists to continue in their mission to understand how photosynthetic organisms function and thrive in natural environments, and enable the development of new technologies that improve human lives.

This scientific connection led to a unique collaboration between Quinn and Benning, who teamed up and received a $1.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study the role that betaine lipids from a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship with algae play in coral bleaching. 

Postdoctoral Researcher Amit K. Singh from the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory Ducat lab was awarded the 2023 Postdoctoral Excellence in Research Award from the MSU Office of Postdoctoral Affairs and the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation for his research in green biotechnology.

Undergraduate researchers from six MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory groups participated in the 2023 University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum, three taking home first-place awards for their poster presentations.

Graduate student Hannah Parks and postdoctoral researcher María Santos Merino have been awarded the 2023 Anton Lang Memorial Awards at a ceremony which took place on Monday, April 24, 2023. This year’s lecture was given by University Distinguished Professor Thomas D. Sharkey from Michigan State University.

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, or GLBRC, another five years of funding to develop sustainable alternatives to gasoline, diesel and other hydrocarbon fuels as well as products currently made from petroleum. The center will receive $27.5 million for 2023 research.

Michigan State University has again been named a top producer of Fulbright U.S. Scholars — establishing MSU as the only research institution in the nation to achieve this status in the last nine consecutive years. With nine scholars, including the PRL's Gregg Howe, MSU is also notably among the top five-highest-producing institutions this year.

Donghee Hoh is the 2022 recipient of the Kende Award, which acknowledges the best doctoral dissertation in plant sciences at Michigan State University over the last two years.

Three scientists affiliated with the MSU College of Natural Science have been recognized as being among the world’s most influential scientists thanks to their papers’ usefulness to other researchers in their fields. Biochemist Gregg A. Howe, ecosystem scientist G. Philip Robertson, and microbial ecologist James Tiedje are among 11 MSU scientists named to the 2022 Highly Cited Researchers List compiled by Clarivate Analytics.

Researchers from the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory Benning lab have received a $1,076,813 grant from the National Science Foundation to bring research into the undergraduate classroom setting with a project looking at how the chloroplast reacts to stress responses in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana.

Michigan State University and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, operated by Stanford University, are working to build new microscopes that allow scientists to peer into plant cells like never before.

Ten Michigan State University laboratories were acknowledged by the Office of Environmental Health and Safety as a part of their inaugural Laboratory Safety Recognition Awards this year.

Third-year graduate student Bianca Serda from the Sharkey lab attended two scientific conferences this summer: The Gordon Research Conference on Biogenic Hydrocarbons and the Atmosphere in June, and the American Society of Plant Biologists Plant Biology Conference in July.

Jianping Hu, professor at the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory (PRL) and the Department of Plant Biology, received a $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the motility of cellular energy organelles, peroxisomes and mitochondria in particular, along the cytoskeleton in Arabidopsis thaliana.

Gregg Howe, an MSU College of Natural Science researcher internationally known for his work on plant resilience and how plants respond to insect attacks, will be heading to the University of Tsukuba in Japan as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar for the 2022-2023 academic year. Howe and his collaborators will apply cutting-edge genetic technologies to the development of crop plants that will contribute to sustainable agriculture and food security.

The MSU Office of Postdoctoral Affairs and the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation annually award the Postdoctoral Excellence in Research Award to two exceptional postdoctoral researchers for their contributions to MSU and the greater research community.

Beronda Montgomery received the Adolph E. Gude Jr. Award, which honors the Gude Family, who made possible establishment of the Gude Plant Science Center. Berkley Walker received the Robert Rabson Award, which recognizes postdoctoral scholars and faculty-level early career scientists who have made excellent contributions in the area of bioenergy research.

Member of the Benning lab at the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory (PRL) Drew Mitchell is a recipient of the 2022 Department of Microbiology & Molecular Genetics (MMG) Dietrich C. Bauer Scholarship Fund award.

Grad student Philip Engelgau and postdoc Peipei Wang have been awarded the 2022 Anton Lang Memorial Award at a ceremony which took place on Monday, April 25, 2022. This year’s lecture was given by Professor Emeritus Govindjee from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

IMPACTS - Integrated training Model in Plant And Compu-Tational Sciences – is a program funded by the National Science Foundation designed to train doctoral students in advanced computational/data science approaches that can be applied to the field of plant biology. The program provides mentorship and funding to the students selected.

The annual forum provides students with an opportunity to showcase their scholarship and creative activity. Held each spring, the University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF) brings together an intellectual community of highly motivated students to share their work with faculty, staff, peers and external audiences and receive constructive feedback from judges.

María Santos Merino, postdoctoral researcher from the Ducat lab at the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory (PRL), is the first to be awarded the Clarence Suelter Endowed Postdoctoral Fellowship Award from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (BMB).

Encouraging kids  to be future scientists is an outreach effort Heather Roney takes seriously. As an early-career scientist, she has looked for opportunities for outreach and ways to widely communicate the research within her field.

University Distinguished Professor Thomas D. Sharkey was named a Pioneer Member of the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB), a recognition given to leaders in the society, especially those who have been involved in training graduate students, postdocs and visiting professors.

Michigan State University’s Beronda Montgomery is the recipient of a 2022 American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) Fellow Award.

Christoph Benning, director of the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory (PRL), was elected a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). He is among 83 academic inventors to be elected to the group in 2022.

Jingcheng Huang is the 2021 recipient of the Kende Award, which acknowledges the best doctoral dissertation in plant sciences at Michigan State University (MSU) over the last two years.

Four Michigan State University College of Natural Science faculty members – Federica Brandizzi, Joseph S. Krajcik, Robert L. Last, and Kenneth M. Merz, were among 11 MSU faculty members named University Distinguished Professors this year by the MSU Board of Trustees in honor of their achievements in research, teaching and mentoring, and community engagement.

The Prize recognizes postdoctoral researchers’, “outstanding contributions to plant biology, based on initiative and originality of the research, productivity, and leadership.” In addition, Dr. Xu, a member of the Benning lab, has accepted a tenure-track assistant professorship at the University of Guelph in Canada.

Kaylie Barton, a recently graduated undergraduate student in the lab of Federica Brandizzi, has won first prize at the 2021 University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum. Kaylie was recognized for her poster presentation in the Plant Sciences category.