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Sustainable Biomass Conversion

Graduate Student Spotlight: Samantha Kelly

Samatha Kelly is a first year PhD student in the Donohue and Noguera labs. She works in late-stage bioprocessing, engineering microbes to break down complex plant structures like lignin and to separate the most useful products. 

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| Michelle Chung, Mary Riker, and Mark E. Griffin
What happens when the thing you thought you wanted turns out to be different than what you expected? This week, Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center Research Coordinator Adrianna Trusiak talks about the pressures of grad school and the tough choices she made to shift her career path. 
| Mark E. Griffin

A new process developed by scientists at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center enables greater production of squalene, a terpene with an array of uses in the biotechnology industry and as an energy-dense biofuel. Researchers increased plant production of the chemical by redirecting production to lipid droplets scaffolded to plastids in the cell.

| Staff

The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center's outreach team joined groups from across UW–Madison for a Saturday of science exploration at the Kujichagulia Center for Self-Determination's Juneteenth celebration on June 18 at Penn Park in Madison. Attendees were invited to explore science at nearly a dozen UW Science Alliance hands-on educational stations, chat with scientists, and more.

| Michelle Chung, Mary Riker, and Mark E. Griffin

What does it mean to foster an environment that truly feels welcoming? For Yiying Xiong, associate director of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, it all comes down to treating a team of coworkers like they are part of a family. Xiong spoke with us about her experiences nurturing these families in the hydropower industry and now academic research.

| Michelle Chung
In a new modeling study, Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) scientists found that an integrated approach combining bioenergy and advanced management of crop, forest and grazing lands can provide climate benefits far greater than either approach alone.
| Emilie Lorditch

An integrated approach to land management practices in the U.S. can reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere far more than earlier estimates based on separate approaches, Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) researchers say. Their research was published May 31 in the journal Global Change Biology.

| GLBRC Staff

The Outreach and Service Awards are given annually to members of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) who have made significant contributions to the Center’s outreach and service mission.

| Mark E. Griffin

“We know more about Saccharomyces cerevisiae, or brewer’s yeast, than just about any other organism,” says Francesca Gambacorta, a graduate student in Brian Pfleger’s lab at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center. 

| Jill Sakai
A new study from the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center describes a complete lignin-to-bioproduct pipeline that could produce high yields of a target chemical with high potential value as a platform chemical to make adhesives, plastics, and other biopolymers.
| Molly A. Seltzer

Biomass can be used to sustainably produce common chemicals instead of oil, but it is unclear which chemicals are most crucial to replace. Now, a Princeton researcher has created a way to rank the chemicals based on the carbon emissions of their production processes.

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