Prof. Kwabena Bediako received the 2025 Calvin University Alumni Award. This award is granted to Calvin alumni in recognition of young grads who are making a splash in their careers and communities, thus personifying the mission of the Calvin Alumni Association. Congratulations, Kwabena!
Prof. Kwabena Bediako has received a 2025 CIFAR Fellowship! The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) is a globally influential research organization proudly based in Canada. We mobilize the world’s most brilliant people across disciplines and at all career stages to advance transformative knowledge and solve humanity’s biggest problems, together. We are supported by the governments of Canada, Alberta and Québec, as well as Canadian and international foundations, individuals, corporations and partner organizations. Congratulations, Kwabena!
Prof. Kwabena Bediako received a 2025 Scialog Fellowship! Approximately 50 early career faculty are invited to participate as Fellows for each Scialog, with early career spanning the time from the first year on the faculty through recently post-tenure.
Scialog supports research, intensive dialogue, and community building to address scientific challenges of global significance. Within each multi-year initiative, Scialog Fellows participate in intensive discussions to identify bottlenecks and encourage innovative approaches, collaborate in high-risk discovery research on untested ideas, and communicate their progress in annual closed conferences. The Scialog process is guided by senior scientists recognized as world-leading researchers in the area of focus. Ultimately, Scialog aims to advance human knowledge by empowering a national community of early career scientists with many promising years of research ahead of them to tackle challenging multidisciplinary problems.
Scialog aims to support early career faculty to expand research in a focused area of high scientific importance; encourage scientists to form multidisciplinary teams to tackle these critical challenges; and help transition awardees to obtain further funding for their innovative ideas. Success for Scialog Fellows is measured by highly impactful results, ongoing support from private foundations and federal agencies, and, ultimately, scientific breakthroughs.
Using the Advanced Light Source (ALS), researchers clarified the mechanism—an unusual intermediate state—that accelerates the transformation of nanocrystals into a superlattice with fewer defects using a two-step, instead of a one-step, process.
The UCLA Academic Senate selected Prof. Jose Rodriguez to receive the inaugural Academic Senate Service Rising Star Award. This award celebrates and recognizes UCLA Senate faculty who are in an early stage of their Senate service and have demonstrated a noteworthy contribution to the Academic Senate. A noteworthy contribution may include activities such as consistent and meaningful participation in committee or council meetings or projects; effective chairship of a subcommittee, special committee or task force; championing shared governance; or demonstrating Senate leadership potential. Preference is given to Senate members who have not yet chaired a standing committee or council. Current committee and council chairs, Senate Leadership and Senate staff are eligible to nominate candidates. Congratulations, Jose!
The findings could pave the way to new treatments for some of our most lethal diseases. For years, graduate student Lily Taylor and her advisor, Professor Jose Rodriguez, have been working on something big: a novel technique that would finally allow scientists to look closely at some of the most “chaotic” viruses in the world. Now, in Taylor’s first published paper as first author, they have done it…
The NSF GRFP recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported STEM disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited US institutions. The purpose of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) is to ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States. The five-year fellowship provides three years of financial support including an annual stipend of $37,000.
Benjamin Hammel, a graduate student in Gordana Dukovic’s group at CU Boulder, received the Best Poster Award at the Mountain States Society of Electron Microscopists (MSSEM) Fall 2024 Conference. Congratulations, Ben!
Professor John (Jianwei) Miao at UCLA has been elected as a 2025 Fellow of the Materials Research Society (MRS) for his research in pioneering coherent diffractive imaging for a wide range of material systems and atomic electron tomography for determining the three-dimensional atomic structure of crystal defects and amorphous materials. Congratulations, John!
UCLA discovery uncovers unique features that advance understanding of the microbe’s movement and infection. African sleeping sickness is a serious infection caused by a parasitic microbe called Trypanosoma brucei. Using an imaging technique called cryo-electron microscopy along with artificial intelligence, a team at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA mapped the hairlike flagellum that the microbe uses to propel itself, identifying 154 composite proteins. Findings revealed that the parasite moves in a distinctive style, similar to a dragon boat, with unique adaptations that are essential to its ability to infect its hosts.