The WH Pierce Global Impact in Microbiology Prize, which honours individuals, teams or organisations whose applied microbiology work has made groundbreaking contributions to global challenges, has been awarded to Professor Chris Greening of Monash University in Australia. Greening leads the CLIMB: Climate and Microbiology Research Unit and serves as Director of the Global Change Program, and his laboratory works across scales that few groups attempt, from atomic-level enzymology to ecosystem-scale greenhouse gas accounting. His team has pioneered discoveries on how microorganisms regulate greenhouse gases, sustain terrestrial and marine ecosystems, and influence One Health outcomes, the integrative framework that links human, animal and environmental health.

What distinguishes Greening’s work, according to the award citation, is its translation into practice. Through major industry and programmatic partnerships, his research has been carried into agricultural methane reduction programs, pathogen surveillance systems, Antarctic stewardship initiatives, and microbial conservation efforts. He has published more than 180 peer-reviewed articles and his honours include the 2023 Australian Prime Minister’s Prize for Life Scientist of the Year, election to three microbiology academies, and recognition as a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. He is also cited as a strong advocate for diverse and empowering environments in science, and has mentored numerous researchers into independent careers and research groups of their own.

The Basil Jarvis Food Security and Innovation Award, which recognises outstanding achievements in applied microbiology that advance global food security and sustainable innovation, goes to Professor Marciane Magnani, Professor of Food Science at the Federal University of Paraíba in Brazil. Magnani is a food microbiology researcher whose portfolio spans food safety, predictive microbiology, fermented and functional foods, and microbiome-related approaches. Her research integrates microbial ecology, fermentation and One Health perspectives, with a particular emphasis on the valorization of native biodiversity and the design of sustainable food systems, work with obvious relevance at a time when food chains face simultaneous pressures from climate change, antimicrobial resistance and shifting consumer demands.

Magnani has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed publications and holds editorial roles at several high-impact journals, including Food Research International and Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety, while serving as Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Letters in Applied Microbiology, an AMI publication. She coordinates Food Science at CAPES, Brazil’s Ministry of Education agency, and is a CNPq Research Productivity Fellow under the Ministry of Science and Technology. Internationally, she sits on the FAO/WHO roster of experts in Microbiological Risk Assessment and on the Joint Expert Meetings on the use of omics-based technologies, contributing to scientific committees and collaborative networks across Europe, the Americas and Asia.

Public health innovation is recognised through the John Snow Public Health Innovation Prize, awarded to environmental microbiologist Professor James Ebdon of the University of Brighton. Ebdon’s applied research examines the role of water and sanitation in the spread and control of water-related diseases, frequently using bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, and other microbial indicators to trace contamination pathways that conventional chemistry cannot resolve. His internationally funded projects have taken him from India with Gates Foundation support to Malawi with UNICEF, Nepal under the Global Challenges Research Fund, and Bangladesh with Elrha and Médecins Sans Frontières, generating findings with direct operational consequences.

Those field programmes have helped to illuminate potential typhoid transmission routes within densely populated slum communities, identify human faecal pollution pathways in surface waters, expose flaws in the construction and siting of shallow wells, and improve emergency sanitation interventions such as lime treatment of faecal sludge during humanitarian crises. Closer to home, Ebdon’s interest in phages led to an invitation to pitch to the UK Government’s Science, Innovation and Technology Committee on behalf of AMI, a contribution that helped trigger a parliamentary inquiry into the antimicrobial potential of bacteriophages launched in November 2022. He co-directs research across the University of Brighton’s Centre for Environment and Society.

The Christiana Figueres Policy to Practice Award, which recognises individuals who bridge the gap between applied microbiology, policy and real-world implementation, has gone to Professor Stephen Obaro, Professor of Pediatrics and Senior Scientist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Obaro is the founder of the International Foundation Against Infectious Diseases in Nigeria, a nonprofit built around the mission of reducing preventable childhood deaths from infectious disease and strengthening health systems where the burden is highest. For more than two decades his research has focused on pneumonia, typhoid fever, antimicrobial resistance, sickle cell disease and emerging threats affecting children, particularly in Africa, and evidence from his West African studies has informed global vaccine development, surveillance strategies and clinical guidelines.

A defining feature of Obaro’s career is capacity building. Through IFAIN he has established a multidisciplinary platform for infectious disease research, laboratory strengthening, surveillance and graduate training, with a laboratory network supporting collaborative work in Nigeria, Liberia and Ghana through the Joint West Africa Research Group. The network provides training and research opportunities for basic and clinical microbiologists through partnerships spanning Africa, the United States and the United Kingdom, an approach that treats sustainable local research infrastructure as an outcome as important as any single publication.

The Rachel Carson Environmental Conservation Award goes to Jack Gilbert, Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, where he is also Associate Vice Chancellor for Marine Science. Gilbert earned his Ph.D. at Nottingham University in 2002 and has held positions at Plymouth Marine Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago. A pioneer of microbial ecology, he co-founded the Earth Microbiome Project and the American Gut Project, founded the journal mSystems, and has authored more than 450 peer-reviewed publications, including the popular science book Dirt is Good. He serves as UC San Diego’s principal investigator for the NIH’s 175 million dollar Nutrition for Precision Medicine program, co-founded BiomeSense in 2018, advises Oath Biome as chief scientific officer, and directs the UC San Diego Soil Health Center. His honours include Popular Science’s Brilliant Ten, the IFF Microbiome Science Prize and election to the American Academy of Microbiology, and he is currently co-chair of the IUCN Microbial Conservation Specialist Group after recently completing a term as President of Applied Microbiology International.

The Dorothy Jones Diversity and Inclusion Achievement Award recognises outstanding contributions to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion within STEM, and this year goes to Afua Acheampong, a senior equity leader, strategist and speaker with more than eight years of experience advancing racial equity across higher education and research institutions. As Head of the Black Internship Programme at Health Data Research UK, she led the strategic design, delivery and expansion of a national programme improving access and career development for Black students and graduates in health data science. She created the Nottingham Trent University Black Leadership Programme in 2019, an initiative that has since supported and graduated over 800 Black students and remains a leading model for inclusive practice in higher education. She previously led race equality at Queen Mary University of London, securing the institution’s first Race Equality Charter award, and serves as Deputy Chair of the Black in Biomedical Research Advisory Group, a national Medical Research Council board overseeing investment into racial equity in biomedical research, as well as Finance Chair of the Minoritised Life Scientists Future Forum. Looking ahead, AMI is expanding the portfolio for 2027 with four new Early Career Excellence Awards in environmental conservation, food security and innovation, public health innovation, and global impact, while the Policy to Practice and Diversity and Inclusion awards remain open across career stages. Winners of all ten awards will be celebrated at the LAM ECR Symposium at Queen Mary University of London in June 2027.

Subject of Research: Applied Microbiology International Horizon Awards 2026

Article Title: Winners of Applied Microbiology International Horizon Awards 2026 announced

Article References: Winners of Applied Microbiology International Horizon Awards 2026 announced. Original publication (Bibliographic details unavailable.)

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: applied microbiology, Horizon Awards, climate change, food safety, public health, waterborne disease, microbial ecology, One Health, diversity and inclusion, STEM equity, bacteriophages, vaccine research

The finding challenges a practice so entrenched in mathematics education that most students and teachers never question it. Open virtually any calculus textbook and you will find chapters organized so that every derivative rule, every integration technique, and every limit-evaluation procedure is practiced in a dedicated block of near-identical exercises. This blocked arrangement feels efficient. Students appear to master a technique quickly, teachers can confirm comprehension at a glance, and homework sessions proceed with a satisfying sense of momentum. But decades of cognitive science have argued that this fluency is largely an illusion, a phenomenon researchers call the illusion of competence: because students know in advance which strategy each problem requires, they never practice the most difficult and most important step—deciding which strategy to use.

Interleaved practice removes that crutch. When problems drawn from different topics appear in mixed order, students must first diagnose the problem—recognizing, for example, whether a given integral calls for substitution, integration by parts, or a trigonometric identity—before they can execute the solution. This diagnostic step, sometimes described as discriminative contrast, forces learners to compare and contrast problem categories rather than repeatedly applying a single memorized template. Laboratory studies dating back to the mid-twentieth century, and more recent classroom experiments in algebra and geometry, have consistently shown that this added difficulty during practice produces substantially better retention and transfer, a counterintuitive pattern known as a desirable difficulty.

What makes the new study consequential is its setting. Calculus is not a laboratory task but a high-stakes, credit-bearing college course that serves as a gateway to degrees in engineering, the physical sciences, economics, and medicine. It is also a course with a well-documented attrition problem: students who arrive with weaker preparation are disproportionately likely to fail or withdraw, and those failures ripple outward, discouraging students from pursuing scientific careers altogether. Demonstrating that a low-cost, curriculum-neutral adjustment to homework design can improve outcomes in this environment matters far beyond the psychology of memory. It suggests that part of the achievement gap in STEM may be an artifact of instructional convention rather than an inevitability of prior preparation.

The study’s headline result is that mixing problems raised performance across the entire distribution of student ability. Higher-achieving students, who might have been expected to gain the least from a change in practice structure, still benefited from the interleaved format, consistent with the broad laboratory literature on spaced and varied retrieval. But the effect was not uniform. Students at the lower end of the achievement spectrum showed the largest improvements, a pattern with significant implications for equity in mathematics education. Interventions that lift the whole class while disproportionately lifting struggling students are rare in educational research, where the most common outcome is that advantage compounds: students who start ahead pull further ahead.

Why would low achievers gain the most? The authors’ explanation, grounded in established learning theory, centers on what blocked practice conceals. Under blocked conditions, struggling students can complete an entire assignment by mechanically repeating the worked example from the top of the page, without ever engaging in genuine problem-solving. The feedback signal is delayed until the examination, when the support of topical grouping disappears and the weakness is exposed too late. Interleaving converts that hidden failure into immediate, low-stakes feedback: students discover early which distinctions they cannot yet make, and instructors can see and address misconceptions while there is still time to correct them. In effect, mixed practice functions as a continuous diagnostic instrument woven into ordinary homework.

The mechanics of the improvement are worth spelling out, because they illuminate why the effect appears in calculus specifically. Calculus is a subject of bewildering surface variety concealing a relatively small set of underlying procedures. Two problems that look nothing alike—a related-rates word problem and an implicit differentiation exercise—may rely on the identical chain-rule computation, while two problems that look nearly identical may demand entirely different tools. Blocked practice teaches students to classify by surface features, which fails the moment an exam mixes contexts. Interleaved practice compels classification by mathematical structure, which is precisely the skill that expert mathematicians deploy automatically. The mixed format thus trains the categorization process itself, not merely the execution of procedures within a category.

The practical barriers to adoption are modest, which adds to the study’s policy relevance. Interleaving does not require new technology, smaller classes, additional instructional hours, or retraining in novel pedagogy. It requires reordering existing problem sets so that review of earlier material is distributed throughout the course rather than concentrated in a single pre-exam scramble—a change that also delivers the well-established benefits of spaced repetition as a side effect. Textbook publishers and online homework platforms could implement the restructuring at scale, and instructors can begin immediately by pulling a handful of problems from prior weeks into each week’s assignment. The chief obstacle, the literature suggests, is perceptual: interleaved practice feels harder and slower to students, and performance during practice sessions often looks worse, which can dissuade teachers who rely on short-term performance as evidence of learning.

That perceptual hurdle is also why studies conducted in real courses, with real grades and real students, carry more weight than laboratory demonstrations. Laboratory experiments on interleaving typically use artificial materials and short retention intervals, and skeptics have reasonably asked whether the effects survive contact with the messy realities of motivation, attendance, and competing coursework. By showing the effect in an authentic college calculus setting—and by showing that it operates most powerfully for the students whom standard instruction serves least well—the new research strengthens the case that desirable difficulties are not merely a laboratory curiosity but a practical lever for improving learning in the courses where the stakes are highest.

The broader message for students, teachers, and curriculum designers is a lesson in intellectual humility about what learning feels like. Performance during study is a poor proxy for durable knowledge, and the teaching practices that feel smoothest often produce the shallowest results. Mixing problem types makes practice harder, slower, and less comfortable—and that discomfort is the signature of the brain doing the comparative, structural work that long-term mathematical competence requires. If the findings generalize across institutions and course levels, as the underlying cognitive theory predicts, then one of the cheapest reforms available to mathematics education may also be one of the most equitable: stop telling students which tool to use before asking them to solve the problem, and let the mixed problem set do the teaching.

Subject of Research: The effect of interleaved versus blocked practice problems on student performance in college calculus

Article Title: Mixing problems increases performance of all students but especially of low-achieving ones in college calculus

Article References: Bennoun, S., Yan, V. X., & Xu, A. (2026). Mixing problems increases performance of all students but especially of low-achieving ones in college calculus. npj Science of Learning. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-026-00450-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41539-026-00450-6

Keywords: interleaved practice, blocked practice, college calculus, desirable difficulties, mathematics education, STEM equity, low-achieving students, retrieval practice, spaced repetition, cognitive science of learning, problem-solving, achievement gap