Prizes

The conference and the ISNSCE society awarded three prizes: "DNA 28 Best Student Paper Award", "ISNSCE Best Student Presentation Award", and "Best Student/Postdoc Poster Award". Recipients of the prize were notified at the conference banquet. A given submission was permitted to win at most one prize.

Best Student Paper Award

This award is for a Track A paper whose lead author(s) was a student at the time of submission. To be fully considered for this award, student authors were asked to submit a letter of nomination from a senior author or advisor indicating which author(s) should be considered for the award, and what their specific contributions to the work were. Award winners were selected by the program committee chairs.

• Winner: Fast and robust strand displacement cascades via systematic design strategies – Tiernan Kennedy, Cadence Pearce and Chris Thachuk.

Best Student Presentation Award

This award is for a Track A or Track B talk whose presenter is a lead author on the paper who was a student at the time of submission. Award winners and runners-up were chosen by a ballot of the conference attendees.

• Winner: Supervised learning in DNA-based winner-take-all neural networks – Kevin Cherry and Lulu Qian
• 1st runner-up: Protecting heterochiral DNA nanostructures against exonuclease-mediated degradation – Tracy Mallette and Matthew R. Lakin
• 2nd runner-up: Exploring Material Design Space with a Deep-Learning Guided Genetic Algorithm – Kuan-Lin Chen and Rebecca Schulman

Best Student/Postdoc Poster Award

This award is for a poster whose lead author(s) was a student or postdoc at the time of submission. Award winners and runners-up were chosen by a ballot of the conference attendees.

• Winner: Fridge Compiler: automated synthesis of molecular circuits – Lancelot Wathieu, Gus Smith, Luis Ceze and Chris Thachuk
• 1st runner-up: Using oxDNA simulations to characterize structural consequences of design modifications on a DNA origami leaf-spring engine – Erik Poppleton, Mathias Centola, Michael Famulok and Petr Šulc
• 2nd runner-up: Scaling up reusable DNA circuits using heat as a universal energy source – Tianqi Song and Lulu Qian