Study Level: Postdoc

The gut microbiome is increasingly recognized as a critical regulator of nutrition, metabolism, immune function, behavior, and aging in animals and humans. However, despite major advances in lab-based animal models, scientists still know relatively little about how gut microbes influence survival and fitness in wild animals living under natural environmental conditions. This knowledge gap is … Read more

This REU Site award to The University of Iowa, located in Iowa City, IA, will support the training of 10 students for 10 weeks during the summers of 2027-2029. The goals of the program are to generate high-impact discoveries about the fundamental biology of host-microbe interactions and to train the next generation of microbial scientists. … Read more

This award will provide partial support for the second Label-Free Single Molecule Sensing Gordon Research Conference, which will be held at Stonehill College from June 6–11, 2027. The first conference of this kind took place in 2025 and was a great success, providing this research community a dedicated meeting place. The 2027 conference will focus … Read more

Free boundary problems are models where one of the unknowns is a shape or interface rather than a function, with part of the model describing the rate at which the interface moves or the shape changes (much like how a differential equation describes how a function changes). This kind of model arises naturally in the … Read more

This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award will advance understanding of how structural collapse influences fire behavior in residential communities, particularly in wildfire-prone regions. At the single-building scale, collapse during fires alters fire behavior by changing compartmentation, ventilation, fuel distribution, flame-spread pathways, and ember generation, with effects pronounced in light-frame wood structures, the most … Read more

Vision foundation models (VFMs) are artificial intelligence systems for “all-purpose” understanding of images and videos. They are currently extremely expensive to create. This high cost restricts their creation to a few highly resourced institutions and leaves independent researchers and the public unable to fully explore how these systems learn. This project seeks to democratize this … Read more

Scientific research today generates data at a scale and pace that far exceeds what most research institutions can manage on their own. Petabytes of measurements from telescopes, particle accelerators, weather sensors, and medical imaging systems sit in disconnected storage systems across the country, out of reach of many scientists who could use them to drive … Read more

Peter Craig is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at Michigan State University. Craig will use observational data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) to measure the rate of Galactic Novae. Craig will also investigate how the properties … Read more

The real world is too complex to model accurately. Autonomous agents and robots that perform complex tasks in the real world, ranging from handling inventory in warehouses to driving, will inevitably encounter scenarios that are not fully described in their symbolic models used for decision-making. To handle such unexpected scenarios, agents often rely on human … Read more

Cell-free protein synthesis systems offer a flexible platform to study biological processes outside of living cells. Despite their promise, these systems remain difficult to characterize and reproduce across laboratories, limiting their broader adoption and utility. This project will develop a rigorous benchmarking framework for protein expression using recombinantly expressed elements (PURE), a cell-free protein synthesis … Read more