News

Charlotte, North Carolina, August 1, 2026 — The Life Sciences Research Foundation (LSRF) today announced funding awards for 33 early-career postdoctoral researchers across all areas of the life sciences. This record-breaking class is the largest in LSRF’s history, making 2026 a truly historic year for the Foundation. This milestone was made possible through the extraordinary generosity and continued partnership of LSRF’s sponsors, whose investment in exceptional early-career scientists is helping shape the future of biomedical research.

The Center for Scientific Integrity is proud to announce the inaugural winners of the 2026 Ctrl-Z Award. Pamela C. Ronald, distinguished professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis, is honored with a Special Commendation for her landmark example of proactive self-correction. 

Pamela Ronald helped isolate the genes that made a certain kind of rice more resistant to flooding, making food supplies more reliable around the world. Learn more in the latest Among the Academies.

The 2026 U21 Award and U21 Leaders of the Future Award winners were revealed on 21 April at the Universitas 21 Annual Network Meeting and Leadership Summit, hosted by the University of Glasgow. Pam Ronald received this year U21 award on Climate Action. Congratulations! 

Congratulations to Oscar Garrett on being selected for the FFAR Fellows Program at North Carolina State University. You can learn more about the program at FFAR Fellows Program and about the university at North Carolina State University.

We are pleased to announce Sangeetha Ramesh has been invited to give a lightning talk and present a poster at the Second International Conference on RiPPs in Seoul, Korea. The conference intends to showcase the numerous impactful advances the field of RiPPs has witnessed since the first conference in 2019. Sangeetha will be presenting on sulfatyrotides associated with plant-microbe interactions. 

We are happy to announce Alexander Howard and Subah Soni recently earned the Henry A. Jastro Stipend Award. The stipend is awarded to outstanding students, in recognition of their potential to carry out research related to the missions of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

We are happy to share that our graduate student researchers, Alexander Howard and Subah Soni, are going to the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines for a Hands-on Training on Biotic Stress Resistance Evaluation.  

Graduate student researcher Alexander Howard has successfully completed the qualifying exam which was for progressing into candidacy in the Biochemistry, Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology (BMCDB) program. His project proposal was titled "Utilizing Bioinformatics and Machine Learning to Explore Expanded Ligand Binding of the Pik-1 Rice Immune Receptor" and focused on ways to better analyze and model directed evolution data to engineer better plant immune receptors. He is hoping to start generating new receptor variants to test out this year.

Dear Readers,

Here we will post all chapters of the Tomorrow's Table book II.

I hope you enjoy reading!

Thanks for comments and support!

Pam