PhD Candidate Anurup Mohanty Receives Honorable Mention for Creative Writing on Microbial Life
August 5, 2026
DEEPS PhD candidate Anurup Mohanty recently earned an honorable mention in the Creative Writing Competition at the 2026 Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon). His piece, "The Lumos Experiment," published on Blue Marble Space's Planetary Perspectives, is a fictional take on the origin of photosynthesis, telling the story of a curious microbe who defies his colony's fear of sunlight and discovers that light might be harnessed. Mohanty works in the Osburn Lab, where he studies life in the deep subsurface through an astrobiology lens. When he isn't analyzing DNA sequence data from microbes around the world, he enjoys writing stories with microbes as protagonists, this story being one of them.
The following is an excerpt from the story:
He went to Billy. Billy the Bacillus lived in a kind of organized chaos, surrounded by membranes, fragments, and experimental constructs that most of the colony either ignored or feared. Some saw him as reckless, others as dangerous, but Lumos saw something else entirely. Billy greeted him with irritation. “Careful,” he said quickly. “You might step on something valuable.” Lumos stepped around the scattered pieces. “How much acetate have you had?” he asked. Billy smirked. “Not enough. Did you bring more?” “No,” Lumos replied. “I brought something better.”
You can read the complete short story, "The Lumos Experiment," on Planetary Perspectives.