Three students recognized with CBS Graduate Student Best Paper Prize

The College of Biological Science is recognizing three graduate students who published exceptional peer-reviewed articles in 2024 with the CBS Graduate Student Best Paper Prize. The competition, now in its sixth year, awards one graduate student from each department with a $500 prize.

This year’s winners are Dr. Kevin MacColl, recent PhD grad in Integrative Biology, Coleman Olenick, MSc in Bioinformatics student, and Dr. Jacob Wilde, recent PhD grad in Molecular and Cellular Biology.

Dr. Kevin MacColl, a recent PhD graduate from Dr. Hafiz Maherali’s lab, for his paper “Prairie restoration promotes the abundance and diversity of mutualistic arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi,” published in July 2024 issue of Ecological Applications.

MacColl studied whether ecological restoration of retired agricultural fields could facilitate the recovery of soil-inhabiting mycorrhizal fungi, which form a mutualistic partnership with plants, providing phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for sugars. He found that restoring these fields to native tallgrass prairie had a positive impact on fungal abundance and compositional diversity in soil, and that recovery took a relatively short time of five to 10 years. To facilitate his work, MacColl built relationships with the Alternative Land Use Services network and collaborated with the School of Environmental Sciences. 

“Kevin took the lead in identifying the best practices for sampling and analysis of DNA sequences, and at every step, extensively reviewed the literature and consulted with experts to make sure that the approach and analytical methods were sound,” wrote Maherali in his nomination letter. “Because we were starting from a position with very little experience in this area, the process took a bit longer, but given Kevin's work ethic and attention to detail, very high quality and impactful work was produced.”

Coleman Olenick, MSc in Bioinformatics and Collaborative Specialization in AI student in Dr. Mazyar Fallah’s lab, for his paper “Identifying a distractor produces object-based inhibition in an allocentric reference frame for saccade planning,” published in the July 2024 issue of Scientific Reports.

Using eye-tracking technology, Olenick studied how our brains focus on targeted objects and filter out distractions. He found that our attention and eye movements are impacted by different stages of decision-making – before and after identifying a targeted object – and the relative position of that object to us, and to other objects, in space. Olenick’s findings have challenged and will reshape long-held models of attention, motor planning and perceptual decision-making.

 “This novel finding challenges long-standing assumptions about spatial coding in attentional suppression and highlights the role of late-stage cortical processing in shaping not only goal-directed eye movements but all decision-making processes,” wrote Fallah in his nomination letter. “The project exemplifies Coleman’s exceptional initiative, scientific maturity, and technical proficiency at an early career stage.”

Dr. Jacob Wilde, a recent PhD graduate from Dr. Emma Allen-Vercoe’s lab, for his paper “Assessing phage-host population dynamics by reintroducing virulent viruses to synthetic microbiomes,” published in the May 2024 issue of Cell Host and Microbe.

Wilde’s research focused on the impact of bacteriophages on the ecosystem of the human gut microbiome. He discovered that when microbiome cultures were grown under controlled conditions in the lab, virulent phages were effectively removed. Wilde was then able to reintroduce the phages to study how the bacterial community responded, considering the impact on bacterial composition and their metabolites. Wilde’s findings will allow researchers to build models that better reflect real-world microbial communities.

“Jacob led the work that described, for the first time, that microbial ecosystems from the human gut could be ‘cured’ of virulent bacteriophages by culturing them under in vitro conditions,” wrote Allen-Vercoe in her nomination letter. “The experiments that Jacob then devised were ingenious in their conceptual simplicity, but actually extremely technically challenging.”