Six MSU Researchers Receive Prestigious NSF Early Career Awards
(Michigan State University) … Daniel Ducat, assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, received $1,033,970 from NSF’s Division of Systems and Synthetic Biology to investigate the fundamental interactions that underpin resilient microbial partnerships and may be key to solving some of the earth’s biggest resource challenges. Ducat’s team will pair cyanobacteria, ancient microbes that have been engineered to use light and CO2to produce sucrose, together with microbes that utilize the sucrose to produce environmentally sustainable materials such as biofuel or bioplastic.
“Getting the call about the award put me over the moon,” said Ducat, whose team will build new, greatly simplified microbial communities to gain insight into how natural symbioses between bacteria evolve. “I get to research new ideas that offer the opportunity to be really creative in the ways that we think about microbial communities, and I was able to recruit new members to the lab who are already proving to be smart, talented and wonderfully fun to work with.”
The NSF award will support two graduate students and a postdoctoral student, provide multiple undergraduate research lab opportunities and promote public forums to discuss the potential benefits and ethics of bioengineering hosted at the Michigan Science Center in Detroit this summer. READ MORE
