Presidents’ Award

This award is inten­ded to recog­nise out­stand­ing con­tri­bu­tions to evol­u­tion­ary bio­logy by a mid-career sci­ent­ist. The award is to be in the gift of the three Pres­id­ents in post at the time (Past-Pres­id­ent, Pres­id­ent and Pres­id­ent-Elect) and so will be known as the Pres­id­ents’ Award. The prize is awar­ded once every six years and the recip­i­ent will give an address at the Joint Evol­u­tion Con­gress on Evol­u­tion­ary Bio­logy in the same year.

Presidents’ Award 2018

The Pres­id­ents’ Award has been con­ferred to Pro­fess­or Loeske Kruuk at the 2. Joint Con­gress in Evol­u­tion­ary Bio­logy in Montpellier.

Loeske Kruuk is a world lead­ing pop­u­la­tion genet­i­cist examin­ing the roles of genet­ics and the envir­on­ment for pop­u­la­tion demo­graph­ics, and in shap­ing life his­tory dif­fer­ences between indi­vidu­als. Her research builds on a long-stand­ing tra­di­tion of cap­it­al­ising on long-term stud­ies of wild anim­al pop­u­la­tions to ask fun­da­ment­al ques­tions about the evol­u­tion­ary pro­cess. She has explored ques­tions relat­ing to life his­tory evol­u­tion in sev­er­al wild ver­teb­rate pop­u­la­tions, ini­tially in Soay Sheep, and more recently in fairy wrens, mos­quitofish, and Aus­trali­an geck­os. She has made a major con­tri­bu­tion to this field by devel­op­ing her eleg­ant ana­lyses of long-term data and she has suc­cess­fully brought this approach to a broad sci­entif­ic and pop­u­lar audi­ence, and also high­lighted the implic­a­tions for oth­er fields. She has pro­duced well over 100 papers and numer­ous books chapters and the very pop­u­lar book ‘Quant­it­at­ive Genet­ics in the Wild’ that have been cited >16,000 times. She has also has been hugely influ­en­tial by sup­port­ing and ment­or­ing numer­ous tal­en­ted stu­dents and post-docs and in facil­it­at­ing extens­ive research col­lab­or­a­tions across the world. As someone has stated: she has built a field rather than an empire, which is a tre­mend­ous legacy.

The Pres­id­ents at that time,
Laurent Keller, Nina Wedell and Ophélie Ronce

Presidents’ Award 2012

We are delighted to announce that the recip­i­ent for the first Pres­id­ents’ Award has been Pro­fess­or Adam Eyre-Walk­er of the Uni­ver­sity of Sussex.

Adam Eyre-Walk­er is one of the world’s lead­ing research­ers in the field of molecu­lar and gen­ome evol­u­tion. Adam was one of the pion­eers of the use of DNA sequence data­bases to extract use­ful inform­a­tion about the pat­terns and pro­cesses involved in the evol­u­tion of gen­omes. He has con­sist­ently been an innov­at­or in mak­ing cre­at­ive use of the inform­a­tion extrac­ted in this way, com­bin­ing bioin­form­at­ic meth­ods with evol­u­tion­ary mod­els based on pop­u­la­tion genet­ics the­ory. He estab­lished his repu­ta­tion by his work on the evol­u­tion­ary forces affect­ing DNA base com­pos­i­tion and codon usage, and the use of spe­cies com­par­is­on of gene sequences to infer the rate of occur­rence of dele­ter­i­ous muta­tions. He has sub­sequently developed new meth­ods for estim­at­ing the fre­quency of adapt­ive changes to pro­tein sequences, and for estim­at­ing the fit­ness effects of non­syn­onym­ous muta­tions, by com­bin­ing inform­a­tion on with­in-spe­cies poly­morph­ism and between-spe­cies sequence diver­gence. He has an impress­ive record of pub­lic­a­tions, mostly in lead­ing journ­als, and has trained many excel­lent post­gradu­ate stu­dents and post-doc­tor­al fellows.

The Pres­id­ents at that time,
Siv Andersson, Bri­an Char­les­worth and Roger Butlin