Brandon Kristy wins DOE award for national energy research

EEB graduate student Brandon Kristy is one of three MSU graduate students who have been selected for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research program. The award provides world-class training and access to state-of-the-art facilities at DOE national laboratories, preparing the next generation of scientists for roles of critical importance to the nation’s energy, science and national innovation priorities.

The program is highly competitive, selecting only 69 students from across 27 states in its most recent solicitation cycle. 

Kristy, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Integrative Biology and a member of the Evans Lab at the Kellogg Biological Station, will go to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to study the "unseen" partners of sustainable bioenergy.

Kristy’s specialty is plant science for sustainable bioenergy, where he investigates how soil microbiomes can help crops like switchgrass thrive without relying on excessive chemical fertilizers.

"Bioenergy crops are a major solution to climate change, but managing them can result in fertilizer waste and runoff," Kristy said. "Amazingly, microbes in the soil can make their own fertilizer. I am interested in exploring how plant-symbiotic fungi can team up with nitrogen-fixing bacteria to provide more nitrogen to these crops naturally."

At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Kristy will use cutting-edge nanoscale ion mass spectrometry to visualize isotopic signatures inside roots and fungi. This high-resolution imaging will allow him to measure the exact nutrient exchange between plants and their microbial teams.

Kristy’s journey was fueled by the Department of Energy, or DOE, ecosystem. After an undergraduate internship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, he joined the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center at MSU.

"DOE programs have been pivotal to my career development and growth as a scientist," Kristy said. “The cutting-edge tools at LLNL will significantly increase the scope and impact of my dissertation.” 

Meet the other award winners at MSU's College of Natural Science.