The Blavatnik National Awards were founded in 2007 with the explicit goal of celebrating the potential of scientists at the beginning of their independent careers, a stage of academic life that often lacks the large-scale recognition reserved for senior figures. Each year, the program honors advances in three broad categories: life sciences, chemical sciences, and physical sciences and engineering. From this year’s cohort of 18 finalists, three laureates were selected, each receiving an unrestricted cash prize of $250,000. That figure makes the Blavatnik National Award the largest unrestricted scientific award in the United States for early-career scientists, meaning recipients can direct the money toward whatever research priorities they deem most promising rather than toward a funder-mandated project. Nagib earned the top honor in the chemical sciences category for his work enabling the faster discovery of better and longer-lasting pharmaceuticals.

For Nagib, the recognition is rooted in a research philosophy that has guided his laboratory since he joined Ohio State in 2014. His team develops new ways to create key medicinal building blocks by harnessing two classes of highly reactive chemical species: radicals and carbenes. Radicals are molecules or fragments that carry an unpaired electron, a structural feature that makes them extraordinarily reactive and therefore historically difficult to control in the precise, predictable way that pharmaceutical synthesis demands. Carbenes, meanwhile, are neutral species in which a carbon atom holds only two bonds and a lone pair, giving them the power to insert into other chemical bonds with remarkable efficiency. Both classes of reagents can accomplish transformations that conventional two-electron chemistry struggles to achieve, but taming them has long been a central challenge of synthetic methodology.

The practical motivation behind this work is the notoriously slow pace of pharmaceutical development. On average, it takes 10 to 15 years for a new medicine to travel from initial discovery to the market, a timeline shaped by the difficulty of designing molecules that are potent, selective, stable, and manufacturable at scale. Nagib’s methods attack this bottleneck directly by helping chemists create more potent and selective medicines faster, cheaper, and more efficiently. By giving synthetic chemists reliable new tools for constructing the molecular scaffolds on which drugs are built, his laboratory aims to compress the earliest and often most exploratory stages of the drug development pipeline, where promising candidates are identified and refined before the costly phases of testing and regulatory review begin.

Accessibility is a defining theme of the Nagib group’s approach. Rather than developing techniques that require rare equipment or specialized expertise, the laboratory has pursued chemistry that any researcher could, in principle, carry out. Nagib has described his dream for these advances as chemistry so simple that anyone in the world can do it without specialized techniques or strategies, and he has framed the group’s overarching goal as the democratization of radical chemistry so that it can be used by all, even within artificial intelligence workflows. That ambition reflects a broader shift in synthetic chemistry, where the value of a method is increasingly measured not only by what it can accomplish in an expert’s hands but by how easily it can be adopted, reproduced, and automated across the global research community.

Artificial intelligence has moved from the periphery to the center of that vision. Previously selected as a Blavatnik National Awards finalist in 2024, Nagib has since refocused a substantial portion of his research program on using machine learning to design new catalysts for drug candidates. One outcome of this effort is an open-source database that allows any researcher, even one working from a smartphone, to simulate chemical reactions and learn how to use radicals selectively. The implications of such tools are considerable. According to Nagib, chemical predictions that once would have taken more than a day to complete can now be accomplished in a few seconds, a speedup that changes the practical rhythm of research planning and lets chemists explore far larger regions of chemical space before committing laboratory time and materials to a synthesis.

Despite these dramatic gains in automation and predictive power, Nagib has been careful to emphasize that technology is a complement to human creativity rather than a substitute for it. He has argued that creativity does not come from sitting alone and having a sudden eureka moment, but instead emerges from constantly discussing new ideas, thinking carefully about why they did not pan out, and then coming up with new ones together. In his telling, the most exciting science lives at the edge of the possible, and the perseverance required to make such ideas actually work is the most rewarding part of the discovery process. That collaborative, iterative ethos is visible in the way his laboratory pairs computational prediction with hands-on experimentation, using each to inform and correct the other.

The scale of the competition underscores the significance of the honor. This year, 372 young scientists were nominated for the national awards, representing 187 academic and research institutions across 43 states and the District of Columbia. Finalists are selected by an independent jury of distinguished scientists, a process designed to insulate the evaluation from institutional influence and to reward genuine scientific impact. Since their founding in 2007, the Blavatnik Awards have invested more than $20 million in over 500 scientists worldwide, building a network of laureates and finalists whose work spans disciplines from structural biology to astrophysics. Nagib is being honored on Oct. 6 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City during the 2026 Blavatnik Awards Gala ceremony, where the winning scientists will each give a short presentation about their research to an audience of peers, patrons, and science leaders.

Looking ahead, Nagib plans to put the monetary award to work immediately within his laboratory, directing the funds toward ongoing projects, the purchase of much-needed equipment and lab instruments, and the pursuit of other new ideas that the prize money makes feasible. Unrestricted awards of this kind are especially valuable for methodological chemistry, where the most speculative projects often struggle to attract conventional grant support before their feasibility is demonstrated. For Ohio State, the laureateship marks a milestone as the university’s first Blavatnik National Award, and for Nagib it serves as a signal from the broader scientific community. As he put it, the award mainly reflects how excited the community is about the work being done at Ohio State, and being recognized in this way motivates the team to keep chasing the stars, a fitting sentiment from a chemist whose career has been built on pursuing the reactive, unruly, and transformative corners of the molecular world.

Subject of Research: Radical and carbene chemistry methods for accelerating pharmaceutical discovery

Article Title: Ohio State professor named Blavatnik National Awards laureate

Article References: Ohio State professor named Blavatnik National Awards laureate. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: David Nagib, Blavatnik National Awards, Ohio State University, radical chemistry, carbenes, medicinal chemistry, drug discovery, artificial intelligence, catalyst design, open-source database, early-career scientists, chemical synthesis

The project taps into iNaturalist, one of the world’s largest biodiversity platforms, where members of the public upload photos, video and audio recordings of the organisms they encounter. While iNaturalist has long been used to map where species live, the new initiative extends its power to a different layer of ecological information: what those species are actually doing when they encounter one another. Users of the platform can now explicitly tag both predator and prey within a single photograph or video, capturing a feeding interaction at the moment it happens. The predator in question may be a lion taking down an antelope or a caterpillar munching on a garden leaf; the database treats both interactions as equally valuable data points in the planetary food web.

Bradley Allf, corresponding author of the paper describing the project and currently a postdoctoral researcher at Colorado State University, began the work while a graduate student at North Carolina State University. He explains that knowledge of what organisms eat remains fundamentally incomplete and fragmented across the academic literature. iNaturalist, he notes, has already proven its worth in documenting which organisms live in different locations, and this project extends that success to feeding relationships. The result is a publicly available website, who eats whom dot org, where anyone can explore recorded trophic interactions through an easily searchable interface. What began as an effort to consolidate scattered knowledge has quickly become one of the largest structured datasets of its kind.

The numbers are already striking. To date, the Who Eats Whom project has logged approximately seventeen thousand observations of trophic interactions involving roughly five thousand seven hundred species. These records have come from around two thousand observers based in more than one hundred countries, spanning ecosystems from tropical forests to suburban backyards. Each observation represents a moment when a person witnessed and documented one organism consuming another, creating a verifiable record that researchers can analyze, visualize and cross-reference with existing scientific literature. In aggregate, these individual moments begin to sketch the outline of a global food web, a planetary-scale network of feeding dependencies that has never been mapped at this level of public participation.

Aditi Mallavarapu, co-author of the paper and an assistant professor of computer science at NC State, approached the project from the perspective of human-computer interaction and tool design. Her interest, she says, lies in building usable interactive tools and learning environments, and the food web presented an irresistibly complex system to work with. The design goals were explicit: the site had to be usable, visually engaging and ethically responsible in the way it handled data contributed by citizen scientists. Mallavarapu emphasizes that the platform is intended to serve both researchers and the general public, helping each group grasp feeding relationships that are too numerous and too intricate to be understood through static tables or technical papers alone.

One of the most revealing early findings concerns what motivates participants. Mallavarapu observes that public interest extends well beyond charismatic predators such as lions and wolves. Contributors are documenting smaller, quieter trophic relationships, such as the insects that feed on persimmon leaves, and are using the site to explore interactions tied to their personal passions and local environments. This breadth of engagement matters scientifically. Ecological research has historically skewed toward large, photogenic species, leaving the vast majority of feeding interactions — particularly those involving invertebrates, plants and microbes — poorly documented. A platform driven by thousands of curious amateurs naturally fills some of those gaps, recording interactions that professional ecologists would rarely have the time or funding to chase.

From a technical standpoint, the database opens several promising research directions. Allf notes that the team can use Who Eats Whom to identify novel trophic relationships that have not yet appeared in the academic literature, then contribute those findings formally to scientific publications. The long-term ambition is for the platform to function as a parallel database that complements the peer-reviewed literature, compiling as much feeding information as possible into a single, accessible location. Because observations are time-stamped and geolocated through iNaturalist, the dataset also carries temporal and spatial dimensions that static literature reviews cannot match, potentially allowing scientists to track how feeding relationships shift across seasons, habitats and years.

Visualization is central to that ambition, and it is where Mallavarapu’s team is investing heavily. She describes a planned visual representation of this planetary-scale food web, designed to capture how trophic interactions relate to one another and how those relationships change over time. A simple version of the interface is already live, but the developers are building richer features that will let users explore feeding patterns and pose practical, personal questions — such as what to plant in a North Carolina garden to attract hummingbirds. That framing reveals the project’s dual identity: it is simultaneously a serious scientific database and an invitation for ordinary people to see themselves as participants in the ecological networks surrounding them.

Data quality remains a central challenge for any citizen science effort, and the team is developing tools specifically to validate submissions tagged on iNaturalist. Verification workflows will help ensure that predator and prey identifications are accurate and that interactions are recorded consistently, protecting the database’s scientific value as it scales. Beyond research, the project has an educational mission. The team has already created educational games built on the database, aimed at helping children understand the food web and the interdependencies it captures, with plans to expand that work if additional funding can be secured. The project was developed with substantial contributions from NC State students, including Maithili Bhoop, Adam Biscoe, Surabhi Nair and Lavanya Middha, alongside the thousands of iNaturalist users whose field observations make the entire enterprise possible.

The underlying research, titled Who Eats Whom? A global food web derived from citizen science, was published on September 22 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology. Senior author is Rob Dunn, a professor in NC State’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; additional authors include Nikhil Vasudeva, a former NC State undergraduate, and David Kikuchi, an assistant professor of integrative biology at Oregon State University. The researchers report no conflicts of interest. As the database grows, its creators hope it will transform not only how scientists study food webs but also how the public understands them — turning every hiker, gardener and backyard naturalist into a node in a worldwide effort to document the fundamental question of ecology: what eats what, and why it matters for the living planet.

Subject of Research: A citizen science platform that compiles global predator-prey interaction data from iNaturalist to map the planetary food web.

Article Title: How amateur naturalists are helping scientists track what everything eats

Article References: How amateur naturalists are helping scientists track what everything eats. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: citizen science, food web, iNaturalist, trophic interactions, ecology, biodiversity, Who Eats Whom, open-source database, PLOS Biology, public engagement, predator-prey relationships, data visualization