As usual, we have an amazingly talented pool of 20 candidates for the 2026 CELL Division Graduate Student Award and the selection was tough. After long deliberation and discussion among our judges, they have narrowed down two candidates from the pool. The first place goes to Anna Lehrhofer from BOKU University (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences) and the runner-up goes to Xia Sun from University of British Columbia.
Anna’s research focussed on various aspects of mechanisms and structures related to cellulose chemistry, in particular the chirality of cellulose-based materials. Her award-winning publication is titled “Elution revolution: Reversing chiral recognition by swapping D- for L-cellulose”. She invested chiral interactions using synthetic L-cellulose, the enantiomer of natural D-cellulose. Her research reveals how molecular chirality governs supramolecular interactions, addressing an essential property of natural polysaccharides. This fundamental study offers new insights into chiral recognition by biopolymers and advances our understanding of enantioselective interactions in biomolecular systems.
Xia Sun’s research focuses on converting biomass, particularly cellulose, into functional three-dimensional structures, including hydrogels, ion conductors, films, and adhesives. His award-winning publication “A biomimetic salting out—alignment—locking tactic (SALT) to design strong and tough hydrogel”, showed that SALT strategy dramatically enhance the mechanical performance of gelatin-based hydrogels. The resulting hydrogels achieve record tensile strength (~10 MPa) and toughness (~14 MJ/m³), approaching the properties of natural tendons. The SALT approach is broadly applicable to other polymer systems, providing a versatile platform for engineering robust bio-based hydrogels.
Both award-winning works are exciting and we will see their talks in the ACS Spring 2026 meeting in Atlanta, in the New Horizons in Renewable Materials: Young Investigators Symposium.
Congratulations to both of them!
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