5 Scientific Organizations Making Important Discoveries

Scientific achievements and breakthroughs have come a long way, thanks to tireless efforts by researchers who study everything from neuroscience to climate change. In no particular order, this list highlights some labs and organizations doing cutting-edge work.

Kicking off our list at #1 is the Baden Lab. Located within the University of Sussex in the UK, the lab was created by Dr. Tom Baden with the intention of studying visual systems. It studies the zebrafish and investigates how it neurologically perceives the outside world.

The lab also maintains a co-affiliation with The Institute for Ophthalmic Research located in Tubingen, Germany. Its scientists publish their findings in various journals and have been featured in the press by outlets such as Gizmodo.

Coming in at #2, we have the Climate Impact Lab, a team of economists, climate scientists, data engineers, and risk analysts from the University of California, Berkeley, the Energy Policy Institute, the Rhodium Group, and Rutgers University.

The lab's goal is to build the world's most comprehensive body of research quantifying the impacts of climate change. It hopes that its research will allow public-facing decision-makers and private sectors to mitigate the risks of climate change through informed investments and policy.

For #3, we present the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, one of the Department of Energy’s Innovation Hubs. The mission of these hubs is to advance promising areas of energy science and engineering from the earliest stages of research to the point of commercialization.

JCESR aims to design and build transformative materials enabling next-generation batteries with advanced energy storage capabilities. It pursues this vision by delivering transformative materials for batteries, including cathodes, anodes, electrolytes, and interfaces, all modified to enhance performance.

The #4 entry is the Messer Lab in the Department of Computational Biology at Cornell University. It is interested in researching a broad range of topics in evolutionary biology and population genetics. A particular focus of the lab lies in studying cases of rapid adaptation.

"In a crowded auditorium at New York’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in August, Philipp Messer, a population geneticist at Cornell University, took the stage to discuss a powerful and controversial new application for genetic engineering: gene drives."

Research projects employ a wide spectrum of computational and analytical approaches in concert with the analysis of large-scale population genomic data. The lab also performs experiments in fruit flies to study the population dynamics of CRISPR gene drives.

Rounding out our list at #5 is the New York Genome Center. This independent, nonprofit academic institution serves as a multi-organization hub for genomic research. Its mission is the advancement of genomic science and its application to drive novel biomedical discoveries.

The center's focus areas include the development of computational and experimental genomic methods and disease-focused research to better understand the genetic basis of cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, and neuropsychiatric disease. Since 2020, the center has also directed some of its energy to studying the COVID-19 pandemic.