Stanford bioengineer Manu Prakash and his collaborator at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Marcel Babin, have been awarded a special honor in recognition of the 250th anniversary of American independence and the longstanding scientific ties between France and the United States.
As part of a symposium “From the Enlightenment to AI: 250 Years of Shared Scientific Revolutions Between France and the United States,” hosted by the National Academies of Sciences of France and the United States, the Richard Lounsbery Foundation created a $25,000 research award to recognize and encourage the continuation of the work of four pairs of researchers working in France and the United States.
Babin and Prakash, an associate professor of bioengineering in the Schools of Engineering and Medicine at Stanford, joined forces to explore the mysteries of life in extreme environments, specifically how microorganisms colonize and thrive within growing sea ice. By combining polar science, micro-scale physics, and bioengineering, they aim to uncover the physical and physiological mechanisms that allow life to persist inside icy worlds. This knowledge is essential for understanding present-day polar ecosystems, past glaciations on Earth, and the potential for life on other planets.
Babin’s team brings expertise in polar ecology and and microalgal physiology, conducting laboratory experiments that reproduce different forms of sea ice. Prakash contributes groundbreaking mathematical and experimental approaches, such as low-temperature ice microfluidics, new low-temperature microscopes, and bioengineering that probe these molecular processes at unprecedented subcellular resolution. Together, their complementary approaches create an entirely new framework linking microscopic cellular behavior to large-scale ice ecological dynamics in an ecosystem that is under threat.
The “Trapped in Ice” project is supported by the Human Frontier Science Program and also involves key collaborators, including Éric Maréchal from CNRS and François Fripiat from Université Libre de Bruxelles.
The symposium took place May 20 and 21, 2026, at the André and Liliane Bettencourt Auditorium of the Institut de France.
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Prakash is also an associate professor, by courtesy, in the Department of Oceans in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, a member of Stanford Bio-X, the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, the Maternal & Child Health Research Institute (MCHRI), and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, and a Global Health Faculty Fellow and a member of the core advisory team at the Center for Innovation in Global Health.
