Two annual awards of €2,000 will highlight the achievements of under-represented early-career researchers (ECRs) who have faced difficult circumstances while conducting their work. Applicable difficult circumstances may be but are not limited to disabilities, social/cultural/political persecution, refugee status, single parenting or other caring responsibilities that have created unequal opportunities. This year’s winners will also be invited to speak at the 3rd Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology in Montreal, Canada (July 26–30, 2024).
The Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation is supporting this initiative.
Call for Applications
Next deadline: January 31st, 2024
Eligibility
- The award is open to PhD students, postdoctoral scientists or non-tenure-track research fellows who do not hold a permanent academic position and have achieved their research while facing difficult circumstances. Note that researchers based in any country are eligible, irrespective of GDP status, and not just in Europe.
- Applications may be submitted by the person benefiting from the grant, or by a colleague/supervisor when a letter is included from the nominee approving their nomination.
- The person submitting the application must be an ESEB member, or become a member immediately after receiving the award (to become a member of ESEB, please visit our membership page).
- Applicants who have previously received this award are not eligible.
- The award stipend (2000 €) will be spent at the discretion of the nominee. Nominees will be required to write a short summary of their achievement to be highlighted on the ESEB Equal Opportunities website and ESEB newsletter.
Application procedure
Applications should be sent as a single PDF file to Ute Friedrich at the ESEB office, office@eseb.org, with the subject line: 2024 Underrepresented ECR Award.
It should include
- A cover letter with the nominee’s name, current status and institution, PhD start date, duration and reason for any career breaks, nominee’s or nominator’s ESEB membership number, and a signed statement on what the nominee has achieved and why you considered the nominee achieved it under difficult circumstances. The difficult circumstances are primarily, but not solely, disabilities, social/cultural/political persecution, refugee status, single parenting or other caring responsibilities. The letter should not exceed 2 pages.
- A short CV of the nominee (1–2 pages)
- Proof of the nominee’s achievement: this can be for instance a PhD diploma, a publication, or an outreach initiative.
- A letter of support from the nominee’s host institution or a colleague.
Applications should be sent no later than Wednesday, January 31, 2024. Please take care to limit the size of attachments (total < 10 MB) in any one email.
Applications will be evaluated by the Equal Opportunity Committee chaired by Anne Charmantier, and winners will be informed around the end of February. Winners are encouraged to attend the next Evolution joint meeting in Montreal, Canada (July 26–30, 2024) where they will be invited to speak at the ESEB award symposium about their work and/or equal representation in the field of evolution. ESEB will contribute to the travel expenses and registration fees.
Winners in 2023
Paul Bangura, Helsinki University, FI – I am from a food insecure country (Sierra Leone) and fish remains the main source of animal protein (85%) but depends largely on wild caught fish to satisfy this need, resulting in overfishing. The motivation for my PhD is to gain knowledge in this sector and help the region in alleviating hunger and malnutrition while protecting the environment and its resources. However, getting to this point has been a difficult journey. Growing up in rural Sierra Leone, achieving an education was fraught with challenges. I attended school barefooted and without meal for the first six years of schooling as this was a luxury I couldn’t afford. During the civil war in Sierra Leone, I was taken captive by the rebels deep into the northern jungle where I was trained as a child combatant. I fought alongside the rebels for about a year before escaping to Freetown. To go back to school, I begged on the streets of Freetown and did different types of odd jobs to raise my school fees. Despite all, I persevered, and I am honoured to now be recognized by the ESEB Under-represented ECR award.
Read Paul’s full biography
Improved productivity in farmed fish involves a long process of domestication, producing a phenotype very different from the wild-type phenotype. While many of these changes may arise due to intentional selection of traits beneficial for captive rearing, such selection can also have negative consequences due to trade-offs with other correlated traits that may be unintentionally selected simultaneously but have a negative influence on productivity. For example, aggressive behaviour has a negative influence on productivity but may be unintentionally co-selected. A second trade-off example is fast growth (positive for aquaculture) and early sexual maturation (negative for aquaculture as growth and flesh quality decrease). The positive correlation between these two traits is generally advantageous in wild populations but should optimally be de-coupled for improved aquaculture productivity. However, detailed studies simultaneously linking the propensity of sexual maturation with behaviours such as aggression, and the possible common genetic basis of these aquaculturally important phenotypes is yet to be conducted. This is now possible thanks to recent work of Craig Primmer’s EVOLUTION, CONSERVATION, AND GENOMICS research group, University of Helsinki for characterising the relatively simple genetic basis of age at maturity in Atlantic salmon, thus allowing use of genetic prediction to characterise the likely age of later sexual maturation already at the juvenile stage (based on the genotype of the vgll3 and six6 genes).
I am a 3rd year PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary Environmental Science doctoral programme, University of Helsinki. My research is investigating how the age of sexual maturation is related to other important characteristics of fish, from both evolutionary and aquacultural perspectives. Therefore, the objective of my PhD project is to use salmon as a model to elucidate the relationship between behaviour at the juvenile stage, and sexual maturation later in life, which is poorly understood, but critical information critical for the aquaculture industry and hence promotes sustainable aquaculture and food security. I am from a food insecure country (Sierra Leone) and fish remains the main source of animal protein (85%) but depends largely on wild caught fish to satisfy this need, resulting in overfishing. The motivation for my PhD is to gain knowledge in this sector and help the region in alleviating hunger and malnutrition while protecting the environment and its resources. However, getting to this point has been a difficult journey. Growing up in rural Sierra Leone, achieving an education was fraught with challenges. I attended school barefooted and without meal for the first six years of schooling as this was a luxury I couldn’t afford. During the civil war in Sierra Leone, I was taken captive by the rebels deep into the northern jungle where I was trained as a child combatant. I fought alongside the rebels for about a year before escaping to Freetown. To go back to school, I begged on the streets of Freetown and did different types of odd jobs to raise my school fees. Despite all, I persevered, and I am honoured to now be recognized by the ESEB Under-represented ECR award.
Zabibu Kabalika, University of Glasgow, UK – Ms. Zabibu Kabalika is a young conservation biologist from Tanzania, East Africa. Her research interests lie in the areas of conservation of migratory animals, human-wildlife interactions and the resilience of ecological processes to long-term changes. She is currently in the final stages of her PhD studies at the University of Glasgow, focusing on the application of isotopic methods to understand movement patterns and niche differentiation between migratory ungulates across the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem in Tanzania.
Read Zabibu’s full biography
Ms. Zabibu Kabalika is a young conservation biologist from Tanzania, East Africa. Her research interests lie in the areas of conservation of migratory animals, human-wildlife interactions and the resilience of ecological processes to long-term changes. She is currently in the final stages of her PhD studies at the University of Glasgow, focusing on the application of isotopic methods to understand movement patterns and niche differentiation between migratory ungulates across the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem in Tanzania.
Zabibu graduated from Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in Wildlife Management. In 2016 she was awarded the highly competitive Karimjee Jivanjee Conservation Scholarship (2016–2018) to attend the international MSc program in Conservation Management of African Ecosystems (CMAE) at the University of Glasgow. During her MSc, she developed a novel approach for geolocating migratory animals across the greater Serengeti ecosystem using sulphur isotopes in tail hairs, which is published in the journal Movement Ecology (https://doi.org/10.1186/s40462-020–00222‑w).
In 2019 Zabibu was awarded the United Kingdom’s prestigious Commonwealth PhD Scholarship (with an additional £35,000 research grant, which is rarely offered) to continue her graduate studies in evolutionary ecology at the University of Glasgow. Her research investigates the use of isotopic methods to understand the evolution of niche differentiation and alternative life history strategies. For example, Zabibu has developed forensic techniques to differentiate resident versus migrant life history strategies using the isotopic signatures found in continuously growing tail hair from both live and dead animals. Her research has also demonstrated periods of dietary overlap in species that migrate together to understand how competition for food may have structured these ungulate communities and their seasonal movements.
As an early career researcher, Zabibu is eager to build her research career in wildlife conservation and she is interested to explore the evolution of life histories of migratory populations more generally. She is currently seeking opportunities to further her knowledge, skills and experience in wildlife conservation research as well as opportunities to form international collaborations. Zabibu’s ultimate goal is to build her research career in her home country, Tanzania.
Previous winners
Affiliations listed at the time of the award.
2022
Kelley Leung, University of Groningen, NL
Öncü Maraci, University of Bielefeld, DE
Kelley Leung, University of Groningen, NL – Polyploidization is detrimental to the individual because of problems of sterility, gigantism, and gene expression. And yet, polyploidy is now recognized as a major evolutionary driver in the ancestry of most Eukaryota, associated with gene network diversification, mass speciation, and higher adaptability. How initial disadvantage and downstream advantage are bridged has been difficult to study in animals because of inviability. In my PhD with Leo W. Beukeboom of the University of Groningen, I exploited multiple pathways of heritable polyploidization in the parasitoid wasp Nasonia vitripennis to develop it into an animal polyploid model. I am honored to now be recognized by the ESEB Under-represented ECR award. I come from Chicago gang territory and a low-income family. I went through a divorce halfway through my PhD. In the final stages, I became unexpectedly pregnant with twins with someone who abandoned them before they were born. But I was able to publish papers, write successful grants, and defend my PhD throughout. I am now raising my beautiful children as a single mother and am a postdoc at the University of Groningen, continuing my work in polyploid evolution as well as biological control and host specificity. I thank my childhood teachers, family and friends, childcare providers, colleagues, and advisors for helping me prove that community is what keeps determined women in the sciences. I hope to live up to being a recipient of this award by increasing the visibility of and creating opportunities for students and scientists from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Öncü Maraci, University of Bielefeld, DE – The gastrointestinal tracks of the animals are home to diverse and dynamic microbial communities, collectively known as gut microbiota. The discoveries in the last two decades have left no doubt that gut microbiota has mutual connections with several aspects of host physiology, fundamentally altering our understanding of animal biology. Today it is well-established that microbial symbionts are functionally involved in countless processes and adaptations of their hosts. Nevertheless, we still lack a proper understanding of the factors shaping the gut microbiota, particularly in birds. I am a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Barbara Caspers at Bielefeld University, the Department of Behavioural Ecology, which has become a refuge to me since 2016. I received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Philipp Schwartz Initiative of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which enabled me to study fascinating interactions between animals and their microbial symbionts. In a broad sense, I aim to understand the causes and consequences of individual-specific microbiomes. In particular, I studied the relative impacts of host selection and social transmission on gut microbiota across different developmental stages in zebra finches. Furthermore, in a collaborative project with Marta Szulkin from the University of Warsaw, I also investigated the impact of urbanisation on the gut microbiota of great tits. My research demonstrated that host-specific factors and environmental modifications collectively shape animal-associated microbial communities leading to tremendous individual variations. As a next step, I aim to understand how individual variation in microbial communities translates into cognitive and behavioural differences.