The National Academy of Sciences selected University of Georgia faculty member Holly Bik as one of eighty-seven of the nation’s brightest young scientists from industry, academia, and government to take part in the National Academy of Sciences’ U.S. and international Kavli Frontiers of Science symposia for 2025. Bik attended the three-day "Kavli Frontiers of Science 2025” conference at the beginning of March, which brought together scientists who are 45 or younger and engaged in exceptional research in a variety of disciplines. A committee of NAS members selected the participants from among young researchers who have already made recognized contributions to science, including recipients of major fellowships and awards. Attendees at these symposia are designated Kavli Fellows.
In 2025, the National Academy of Sciences will hold three Kavli Frontiers of Science symposia that included the US national symposium, an international bilateral symposium with Israel and a trilateral symposium with Japan and Germany.
The U.S. symposium took place March 6-8 at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering in Irvine, California.
"The conference was quite a thought-provoking program that highlighted interdisciplinary research advances," said Bik, associate professor in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of marine sciences and the Institute of Bioinformatics. She highlighted her favorite sessions from the conference:
- Seeing the world through different lenses (neuroscience research that is now trying to reconstruct people’s mental images from brain scans)
- From organisms to superorganisms: major transitions in biological complexity (how multicellularity evolved from single cells, and how insects evolved to function as large social groups)
- Who is space for? (approaching a new era of space exploration that includes heavy investment from private sectors and new countries such as the UAE space agency)
Research in the Bik Lab utilizes high-throughput sequencing and diverse –Omics approaches to explore broad patterns in marine microbes – biodiversity and phylogeography, functional roles for microbial taxa, and the relationship between species and environmental parameters – with an emphasis on microbial eukaryotes in marine sediment habitats.
"The Kavli conference was a rare opportunity to talk about research with people you wouldn’t normally meet at conferences – Astronomers, Physicists, and Engineers as well as other biologists," Bik said.
Image: UGA Associate Professor Holly Bik stands on the bow of the Nathaniel B. Palmer, the icebreaker that took her team on a research expedition to East Antarctica for 48 days from February to May 2023, conducting research in a location no U.S. research vessel had traveled in 22 years.