Founding Faculty Awards Honor Research by Emily Armbruster and Pierce Ford

January 14, 2026

By Mario Aguilera

(from left) Founding Faculty Award recipient Pierce Ford, Professor Eric Bennett, Professor Joe Pogliano, Founding Faculty Award recipient Emily Armbruster and Dean Kit Pogliano.

Graduate students across the UC San Diego campus conduct a range of impactful research studies, spanning from probing the causes of disease to how the brain functions to the environmental effects of pollution.

UC San Diego’s School of Biological Sciences has made an annual tradition of celebrating outstanding graduate student research. Awarded since 2015, Founding Faculty Awards for Graduate Excellence are selected by a committee of Biological Sciences faculty members.

The 2025-2026 Biological Sciences Founding Faculty Awards were recently presented to Emily Armbruster and Pierce Ford.

Emily Armbruster

Armbruster, who conducted research in the labs of Professors Joe and Kit Pogliano, is being recognized for contributions to science’s understanding of large bacteriophage, which are viruses that infect bacteria and are being developed as new agents for bacterial infection treatments. Armbruster served as co-lead author of “Sequential membrane- and protein-bound organelles compartmentalize genomes during phage infection,” a study published in Cell Host & Microbe that described the discovery of a stealth membrane-bound sac, or vesicle, that jumbo phages use to evade detection by the bacterial immune system. “When phage infect a bacterial cell, the EPI vesicle protects the genome of the virus during early stages of infection when it’s very vulnerable,” said Armbruster. “Bacteria and viruses are often dismissed as simple organisms but they’re actually capable of very sophisticated intracellular warfare and this study is a new example of that.”

Armbruster graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biology from California Lutheran University in 2019. As an undergraduate, she conducted research in both organic chemistry, developing novel DNA dye molecules, and molecular parasitology, studying the life cycle of dysentery-causing amoeba. Armbruster completed her Biological Sciences PhD in summer 2025 and is now a postdoctoral scholar at the Berkeley-based Innovative Genomics Institute studying the bacterial immune system.

Pierce Ford

Ford, a fourth-year doctoral student in Professor Eric Bennett’s lab, was honored with a Founding Faculty award for his research uncovering new quality control machinery that oversees proper ribosome function, a key molecular machine within cells that decodes genetic information into proteins. More than half of the cell’s energy is spent synthesizing ribosomes, and many human genetic diseases are linked to defective ribosome assembly. Ford is the lead author of “RNF10 and RIOK3 facilitate 40S ribosomal subunit degradation upon 60S biogenesis disruption or amino acid starvation,” a study published in Cell Reports. The research focuses on translation quality control pathways and provides the first evidence of a mechanism for targeting problematic ribosomes for degradation in response to translation stress.

Ford received his bachelor’s degree in molecular, cell and developmental biology from UCLA in 2019. Initially a mathematics major, his passion for biology was ignited by a genetic engineering course taught by the late Professor Robert Goldberg, who became his mentor and advisor following the class. After switching majors, Ford began working in Goldberg’s lab on decoding soybean seed gene regulatory networks. He joined the Bennett Lab in the UC San Diego School of Biological Sciences in 2022, focusing on characterizing mechanisms that regulate protein synthesis with an aim to leverage these mechanisms to improve cellular stress response systems.

Photos of Founding Faculty Award honorees are featured in the lobby of Bonner Hall.