More than 210 scientists and guests from across the Department of Energy’s Center for Bioenergy Innovation’s (CBI) 22 research partners, its Board of Directors and Science and Industry Advisory Board gathered at the center’s annual science meeting in mid-June to share breakthroughs from the past year.
CBI’s research footprint extends across the nation, including national labs, academic institutions, research foundations and private companies, leveraging a multidisciplinary approach to its mission of developing biotechnology for the production of advanced chemicals and materials. Ten teams and three domain leads focus on all aspects of the biomass-to-products research pipeline across the partnership structure, with guidance from the board of directors and advisory board.
“CBI’s innovative accomplishments are made possible by our integration of world-leading expertise across disciplines ranging from genomic science to metabolic engineering, advanced catalyst design, lignin valorization and technoeconomic analysis. These innovations are possible because of the large teams of scientists across institutions focused on shared set of goals. Such accomplishment are unique to an integrated center,” said Jerry Tuskan, director of CBI and Corporate Fellow at the center’s lead organization, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Each team lead presented an overview of advancements from the past year, with early career researchers presenting deep dives on breakthroughs. Teams include computational biology, rapid genetics for plants and microbes, poplar domestication, switchgrass domestication, fundamentals of deconstruction and plant cell walls, consolidated bioprocessing, lignin valorization, catalytic upgrading, sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), and economic and land use modeling. CBI researchers published 104 scientific papers and 129 datasets with DOIs over the past calendar year. The center has a total of 1,775 publications to date, with nearly 155,0000 citations.
CBI science meeting attendees joined in research poster sessions, and early career staff presented flash talks on their work and participated in special networking and skill-building activities. CBI hosts Early Career Fellows each year to give scientists experience stewarding an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional science center. This year, Early Career Fellow Mallory Morgan helped organize the annual science meeting and flash talks.
Best Early Career flash talk at the meeting was awarded to Kayla Wozny of the University of Virginia (UVA), who presented research on olefin oligomerization for SAF production.
Best poster awards were presented to (includes poster title or topic):
- Jack Bailey-Bale, University of California. Davis, Field-Validated Futures: Gene-Edited Tree Performance Across Diverse Environments;
- Jeremy Jewell, Washington State University, Variation in an Uncharacterized Conserved Small Protein is Associated with Root and Shoot Biomass;
- Kayla Wozny, UVA, Olefin Oligomerization over Solid Acid Zeolites for SAF Production;
- Alisa Tannirat, University of Georgia, Pine Feedstock High-Risk High-Reward project;
- Sekhar Yadavalli, University of Georgia, Engineered Biocomposites from CBP Residuals: Scaling Solvent-Free Thermoplastics for the Circular Bioeconomy;
- Erica Prates, ORNL, Mechanistic Structural Systems Biology of Lignin in Switchgrass;
- Gui Zheng, National Laboratory of the Rockies, Biorefinery Siting GIS Research;
- Eashant Thusoo, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Multi-Omic Characterization of Clostridium thermocellum Stationary Phase and the Regulatory Role of ATP-Dependent Phosphofructokinase; and
- Austin Carroll, ORNL, Characterization of Environmental Microbes for the Catabolism of Lignin-derived Aromatics.
CBI is supported by the DOE Office of Science’s Biological and Environmental Research program.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE’s Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science. —Stephanie Seay
Jerry Tuskan gives the opening talk at the CBI annual science meeting on June 16, 2026. Credit: Alonda Hines/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy