Chemical and biological engineering graduate student Chris Mehrer had one of the top-two posters at the 2018 Metabolic Engineering 12 conference, winning him a $500 prize sponsored by the American Chemical Society synthetic biology journal. Mehrer works in the research group of Brian F. Pfleger, the Jay and Cynthia Ihlenfeld Professor. His poster, “Anaerobically autoinduced fatty alcohol production in Escherichia coli,” described a method to produce useful chemicals using genetically modified bacteria. Metabolic Engineering 12 is one of the premier conferences for the field, and the meeting is organized by the world’s leading organization for chemical engineering professionals, AIChE.