ESEB and the Journal of Evolutionary Biology (JEB) award an annual prize for the best graduate papers published in the journal in that calendar year. The award is named after Stephen Stearns, who played a major role in establishing both JEB and ESEB (article).
The Stearns Graduate Student Prize is aimed at recognising outstanding graduate (Masters or PhD) research. While previously awarded to a single winner, since 2022 the JEB editorial board selects up to three joint awardees each year. This change recognises the fact that research excellence comes in many facets, ranging from the innovative nature of the questions addressed, over the technical challenges in performing the research to the scientific and societal impact of the results.
The award includes an invitation to attend the ESEB Congress (registration fee covered), where awardees present their work in a dedicated Stearns Prize symposium.
Information
Eligibility
The Stearns Prize recognises the outstanding contribution of graduate students to research published in JEB. Graduate students are eligible for the prize if they led both the research described in the article and the writing of the manuscript itself (supervisors will be asked to confirm this before awards are made). Reflecting their role, we would then also usually expect the student to be the lead (first) author. We expect papers to be submitted within two years of completing the project.
Nomination
Student-led articles that are eligible for the Stearns Prize are identified at the point of submission through a question “Was this study led by a graduate student?” in the ScholarOne form. Any manuscript for which the corresponding author answers “Yes” and identifies the student among the authors will, if accepted, be automatically considered for the Stearns Prize in the year of its publication. Self-nomination is encouraged, where the graduate student leading the study is also the submitting and corresponding author.
Selection criteria
All papers published in JEB that were entered at the point of submission as above are considered for the Stearns Prize. Editors will be asked to shortlist articles from the student-led papers they handled based on the following criteria:
- addresses an innovative research question or approaches the question in an innovative way
- contains technically challenging work
- displays a particularly robust approach to answering the research question
- demonstrates commitment to Open Science through the quality of the archived material accompanying the article (e.g. detail of readme files, organisation, presence of code) that maximises the potential for reusability and reproducibility of the research.
Shortlisted papers are then ranked using the same criteria as above by a panel of editorial board members, who have no conflicts of interest and who did not handle the papers, to minimise bias towards a particular field. The panel will be instructed to be aware of potential biases in their evaluation i.e. gender, nationality, geographic location. The top papers (up to 3 winners) will be awarded the Stearns Prize for that calendar year.
2022 Winners
Haley Kenyon
![Picture Haley Kenyon](https://eseb.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/HaleyLKenyon-295x300.webp)
This paper was inspired by a desire to understand the selective pressures driving colour pattern divergence among closely related, sympatric species and I am honoured that it has been recognized with a Stearns Prize. This project was conducted as part of my PhD research at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada in collaboration with my PhD advisor Paul R. Martin.
To study behavioural responses to colour pattern differences between species, independent of size or shape differences, I painted 3D printed models to exactly match the spectrometer-measured colours of individual male museum specimens of three bird species: black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) and their equally closely related congeners, mountain chickadees (P. gambeli) and Mexican chickadees (P. sclateri). Black-capped chickadees co-occur with the more differently coloured mountain chickadee in parts of their range, but never live with the more similarly coloured Mexican chickadee. To test the hypothesis that these colour pattern differences are driven by selection against hybridization, we presented pairs of these models to naïve black-capped chickadee females and observed which models they were most likely to direct copulation solicitation displays towards. We found that females were less interested in mating with more divergently coloured models under certain conditions, suggesting that colour pattern divergence may indeed reduce mixed mating, and should therefore be favoured by selection against hybridization. This experiment was extremely challenging, but incredibly rewarding, and I am excited about what else we can learn about signal evolution and species coexistence through this type of tightly controlled field experiment in the future.
Subham Mridha
![Picture Subham Mridha](https://eseb.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Subham_Mridha_photo-169x300.webp)
I majored in zoology during my bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Presidency University, Kolkata, India, with a specialization in ecology. Then I moved to Switzerland to pursue my PhD in evolutionary biology in the lab of Prof. Rolf Kümmerli at the University of Zurich studying phenotypic heterogeneity in bacterial populations. Thereafter, I pursued postdoctoral research studying prey-predator interactions in microbes. Recently I have moved to the University of Pennsylvania, USA for a postdoc in the field of immune-microbiome interactions. I am broadly interested in field of microbial ecology and evolution, with the intention to bridge fundamental and translational research.
In this research conducted during my PhD, we investigated whether division of labour evolve with respect to public goods in the opportunistic pathogenic social bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We observed that specialists did not indulge in cooperative division of labour but rather could co-exist via mutual cheating. Contrary to popular observations in other study systems, our results suggest that there is a narrow range of conditions under which division of labour can evolve.
(X handle: @SubhamMridha)
Donal Smith
![Picture Donal Smith](https://eseb.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Donal-225x300.webp)
This study was conducted as part of my PhD research at the University of Salford and the Zoological Society of London. Under the guidance of my supervisors Robert Jehle and Trent Garner, alongside colleagues at the Institute of Zoology and the Highland Amphibian and Reptile Project, I set out to explore the relationship between host genetic diversity and capacity to defend against novel pathogens. Here, the host was the common toad, and the pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), a fungus that has caused catastrophic declines and extinctions across hundreds of amphibian species, making it the most destructive pathogen of vertebrates ever characterised. It is not, however, universally destructive, and some host individuals and populations fare better than others. To better understand this, we focused on toad populations situated on the north-western edge of the species range on and around the isle of Skye in Scotland.
Combining controlled infection experiments with genetic analyses, we showed considerable genetic divergence between toad populations and a strong influence of population identity on response to this novel pathogen. But this response did not seem to be driven by genetic erosion on comparatively isolated islands. Indeed, heterozygosity showed an unexpected negative relationship with survival. Our findings underscore the importance of context dependency in complex host-pathogen dynamics, and caution against simplistic assumptions about the vulnerability of genetically depauperate host populations.
These days, I still focus on islands, but in a different way. I work with Monash University researching and restoring the ecology of Browse Island in the Timor Sea, helping a degraded island once teeming with seabirds to flourish again.
2021 Winner
JEB & ESEB are delighted to announce that the winner of the 2021 Stearns Prize for a paper published in JEB by a graduate student is Juliette Aminian Biquet, for her paper “Phenotypic plasticity drives phenological changes in a Mediterranean blue tit population” (doi.org/10.1111/jeb.13950). Juliette presented some of her work at the ESEB2022 congress in Prague, Czech Republic.
![Picture J. Aminian Biquet](https://eseb.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Juliette-Aminian-Biquet-300x225.jpg)
We conducted this study during my Masters degree in 2019, supervised by Céline Teplitsky and Suzanne Bonamour, helped by Pierre de Villemereuil and the awesome tit team at CEFE (Montpellier, France). Forty years ago, researchers initiated monitoring of a blue tit population in Corsica, which now enables us to study their characteristics, including the evolution of their phenology over time. These birds have been laying eggs earlier and earlier, likely adapting to the changing climate, and the induced trophic shifts, to match the earlier peak of prey abundance. For my masters’ thesis, we wanted to understand whether the laying date advancement was due to changes in the genetic composition of the population, induced by selection across generations, or due to plastic variations within each generation of tits. Addressing such research questions remains challenging in wild populations, where monitoring individual fitness is difficult. Here, we used quantitative genetics, thanks to 40-years worth of data and a well-documented pedigree. We also worked a lot on the choice of our statistical Bayesian model, to be confident in our results. Finally, we showed that these birds could adapt based on their laying date plasticity, and found no genetic changes related to laying phenology. I personally was super excited to join this work on how we can describe and eventually predict evolution of living beings. I am now working on ecosystem conservation, in which evolutionary dimensions are very important and difficult to account for.
Previous Winners
2020 – Jack Common
“Diversity in CRISPR-based immunity protects susceptible genotypes by restricting phage spread and evolution” (doi.org/10.1111/jeb.13638)
2020 – Runners-up were Bruno Genevcius, Graeme Keais, and Alexandra Cones.
2019 – Thomas Keaney
“Mother’s curse and indirect genetic effects: do males matter to mitochondrial genome evolution?” (https://doi.org/10.1111/jeb.13561)
2019 – Runners-up were Nadia S. Sloan and Daniel Shane Wright.
2018 – James Santangelo
“Herbivores and plant defenses affect selection on plant reproductive traits more strongly than pollinators” (https://doi.org/10.1111/jeb.13392).
2018 – Runners-up were Eva Troianou, Peter Moran, Urtzi Enriquez-Urzelai, Joshua Alpern, and Casper van der Kooi.
2017 – Jack Colicchio
“Transgenerational Effects Alter Plant Defense and Resistance in Nature” (https://doi.org/10.1111/jeb.13042)
2017 – Runners-up were Keely Brown, Zacharia Grochau-Wright, Ryosuke Iritani, Kim Kirchhoff , and Erin Morrison.
2016 – Amaranta Fontcuberta
“Extreme genetic diversity in asexual grass thrips populations” (https://doi.org/10.1111/jeb.12843)
2016 – Runners-up were Matt Wilkins and Karl Grieshop.
2015 – James Lichtenstein
“Similar patterns of frequency-dependent selection on animal personalities emerge in three species of social spiders” (https://doi.org/10.1111/jeb.12651)
2015 – Runners-up were Arthur Porto, Evan Hersh, and Damien Farine.
2014 – Ellie Harrison
“Sex drives intracellular conflict in yeast” (DOI: 10.1111/jeb.12408).