Yaoping Zhang Bioenergy Research Award

Established in 2024, the Yaoping Zhang Bioenergy Research Award is given annually to recognize members of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center community who have made important research contributions through high-impact, peer-reviewed publications that advance the center’s scientific mission to develop sustainable lignocellulosic biofuels and products. 

Yaoping Zhang was a senior scientist and collaborator who led GLBRC’s Experimental Fermentation Facility, made multiple key research contributions, and authored important GLBRC publications from 2011 until his death in April 2024. Zhang’s contributions included multiomics characterization of Z. mobilis and developing both the center's synthetic hydrolysate and its aqueous ammonia deconstruction pipeline documented in a remarkable set of 28 published papers.

Read more about Yaoping Zhang.

Dae Kwan Ko, a senior scientist in the Brandizzi Lab at MSU, received the third-annual Yaoping Zhang Bioenergy Research Award for his development of a gene-discovery pipeline to speed discovery of gene regulatory networks in non-model bioenergy crops. 

2025: Avery Vilbert
A scientist in the Donohue lab, Vilbert studies Novosphingobium aromaticivorans, a bacteria that lives on aromatic hydrocarbons. Using genome mining, she discovered several enzymes crucial for converting lignin into products used to make bioplastics, cosmetics, and other industrial commodities.

2024: Steven Karlen and Sang-Jin Kim
Kim, a research assistant professor in the Brandizzi lab at Michigan State University, was recognized for his dedication and ingenuity in both basic and applied research on cell wall biology, particularly for his success in raising glucan levels in sorghum biomass. Karlen, who joined the center in 2012, maintains instrumentation across labs, interprets analytic data for most research groups, and has a hand in identifying the GLBRC’s larger research directions. 
Read more about Karlen and Kim's contributions»