WormBoard is pleased to announce Dr. Xuhang Li (under the mentorship of Marian Walhout and Safak Yilmaz) as the recipient of the 2026 Sydney Brenner Thesis Award.
Dr. Li’s dissertation makes a major, field-shaping contribution to the systems biology of metabolism by developing an end-to-end genomic framework for measuring and interpreting metabolic wiring and rewiring in a whole animal. Central to this work is the development of Worm Perturb-Seq, a scalable perturbation transcriptomics platform that enables high-resolution RNA-seq readouts across hundreds of genetic perturbations in C. elegans. By integrating these data with rigorous analytical and metabolic network modeling approaches, Dr. Li’s work bridges gene expression, regulatory networks, and organismal metabolic flux, revealing new principles of metabolic compensation and rewiring that will influence how metabolism is studied in worms for years to come.
In addition to the award recipient, the committee recognizes Dr. Grace Swaim with an Honorable Mention for an outstanding dissertation that was highly regarded by the judges for its quality, rigor, and scientific insight. Dr. Swaim’s work was conducted in the laboratory of Shaul Yogev.
The committee would like to thank all applicants for an exceptional pool of theses this year, and we extend our sincere gratitude to the judges Michal Turek, Salvatore Cherra, Priya Sivaramakrishnan, HaoSheng Sun, Zhao Xuan, and Michael Shapira for their time, thoughtful evaluations, and service to the C. elegans community.
Congratulations to Dr. Li and Dr. Swaim on these well-deserved recognitions.
Caroline Kumsta and Robert Luallen
On behalf of WormBoard