ALT Jamin Trevino practicing the steps for handling the special form capsule that holds the radium-226. He has a metal cylinder in his left hand and various equipment for handling radioactive material behind him.

ALT A National Laboratory of the Rockies bioengineering postdoctoral researcher conducts a protein purification.

ALT A map of the United States shows soil with high concentrations of cerium, lanthanum, scandium, and yttrium. Data were drawn from the National Uranium Resource Evaluation’s Hydrogeochemical and Stream Sediment Reconnaissance project.

ALT A Venn diagram. The diagram is captioned: “How functionally and ecologically diverse is microbial rare earth element (REE) utilization?” and “‘Atlas’ of microbial REE utilization and REE binding proteins.” The top circle is labeled “Discovery across ecosystems: Bioinformatics, predictive geospatially informed models, environmental metagenomics.” The second circle is labeled “High-throughput validation: In vitro protein expression, binding affinity and selectivity, protein stability/aging.” The final circle is labeled “Elucidate microbial function: Mutant phenotyping, multiplexed engineering, genome-wide genotype-to-phenotype.”

ALT Robotic liquid handler (Opentrons OT-2) setting up a multiplexed protein assay.

ALT A smiling person with curly hair, wearing a short-sleeve button-up shirt, stands with his arms crossed in a softly lit indoor setting.