Dr. Tanja Stratmann has been awarded the prestigious Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). Starting in 2026, Dr. Stratmann will spend five years researching the nitrogen cycle of living and fossil sponges at MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen.

A pioneering study led by the University of Oxford in collaboration with international partners has applied AI for the first time to count the Great Wildebeest Migration from satellite images. Unexpectedly, the results showed fewer than 600,000 individual wildebeest – less than half the previous estimate of 1.3 million animals. The results have been published today (9 Sept) in PNAS Nexus.

During his PhD at UMass, Nikhil Malvankar was laser-focused on quantum mechanics and the movement of electrons in superconductors. Now a professor at Yale, the native of Mumbai, India, has pivoted towards biology to explain how bacteria breathe deep underground without the aid of oxygen. 

To date, his lab at the Yale Microbial Sciences Institute has uncovered the evolutionary trick used by bacteria to breathe through tiny protein filaments, called nanowires, to dispose of excess electrons from the conversion of organic waste to electricity. The adaptation has enabled bacteria to send electrons over distances 100-times their size through what the scholars refer to as bacterial “snorkeling.”

LIFE SCIENCES

Daniele Canzio, PhD, University of California, San Francisco (Neuroscience)

Kaiyu Guan, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Agriculture & Animal Sciences)

Philip J. Kranzusch, PhD, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Harvard Medical School (Microbiology)

Elizabeth Nance, PhD, University of Washington (Biomedical Engineering & Biotechnology)

Tomasz Nowakowski, PhD, University of California, San Francisco (Neuroscience)

Samuel H. Sternberg, PhD, Columbia University/Howard Hughes Medical Institute (Molecular & Cellular Biology)

CHEMICAL SCIENCES

Song Lin, PhD, Cornell University (Organic Chemistry)

Joseph Cotruvo, Jr., PhD, The Pennsylvania State University (Biochemistry & Structural Biology)

Frank Leibfarth, PhD, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Polymer Chemistry)

Ryan Lively, PhD, Georgia Institute of Technology (Chemical Engineering)

Leslie M. Schoop, PhD, Princeton University (Inorganic & Solid-State Chemistry)

Yogesh Surendranath, PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Inorganic & Solid-State Chemistry)

PHYSICAL SCIENCES & ENGINEERING

Charlie Conroy, PhD, Harvard University (Astrophysics & Cosmology)

Nathaniel Craig, PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara (Theoretical Physics)

Matthew McDowell, PhD, Georgia Institute of Technology (Materials Science & Nanotechnology)

Prateek Mittal, PhD, Princeton University (Computer Science)

Elaina J. Sutley, PhD, University of Kansas (Civil Engineering)

Zhongwen Zhan, PhD, California Institute of Technology (Physical Earth Sciences)

Adenomyosis affects up to one-third of women of reproductive age and is linked to pain, heavy bleeding, and infertility. Researchers from Jiaxing University and Tongji University have developed a new laboratory “assembloid” model that mimics uterine tissue, published in SCIENCE CHINA Life Sciences. The model reveals that abnormal stromal cell subgroups may disrupt BMP and WNT signaling pathways, driving disease progression. This work provides a valuable tool for studying adenomyosis mechanisms and developing new treatments.