Stearns Graduate Student Prize

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 will be awar­ded the Ste­arns Prize for that cal­en­dar year.

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2024 Winners

Théo Bod­ineau

This research paper was driv­en by the need to bet­ter under­stand rel­at­ive con­tri­bu­tions of breed­ing dates and thermal con­di­tions dur­ing gest­a­tion on fit­ness of females and their off­spring in vivi­par­ous rep­tiles. I am hon­oured to receive a Ste­arns Prize for this research which was con­duc­ted as part of my PhD at the Insti­tute of Eco­logy and Envir­on­ment­al Sci­ences of Par­is, Sor­bonne Uni­ver­sity (France), in col­lab­or­a­tion with my PhD advisors Sandrine Meylan, Pierre de Ville­mereuil, Jean-François Le Gal­liard and field engin­eers from the CEREEP-Eco­tron IleDeFrance (France), Beat­riz Decen­cière and Simon Agostini. We exposed females of the com­mon liz­ard (Zootoca vivi­para) to con­trast­ing thermal scen­ari­os (cold vs. hot treat­ment) dur­ing gest­a­tion and quan­ti­fied effects of par­tur­i­tion dates and thermal treat­ment on life-his­tory traits of females and their off­spring for one year. Over­all, our res­ults sug­gest that par­tur­i­tion date has a great­er impact than thermal con­di­tions dur­ing gest­a­tion on life-his­tory traits of females and juven­iles. Moreover, our find­ings reveal a poten­tial moth­er-off­spring con­flict regard­ing the optim­isa­tion of par­tur­i­tion dates: while earli­er par­tur­i­tion enhances juven­ile sur­viv­al, growth, and recruit­ment, it sim­ul­tan­eously imposes ener­get­ic costs on preg­nant females. Although numer­ous stud­ies focused on the dir­ect effects of alter­a­tions in incub­a­tion tem­per­at­ures on rep­tile life-his­tory traits, our res­ults high­light the import­ance of con­sid­er­ing the role of breed­ing phen­o­logy in assess­ing the short- and long-term effects of thermal devel­op­ment­al plasticity.

Mari­on Leménager

I am deeply honored to receive the Ste­arns Prize in recog­ni­tion of my research on the intraspe­cif­ic evol­u­tion of flor­al vari­ation with­in pol­lin­a­tion sys­tems involving both spe­cial­ists and gen­er­al­ists. This work was car­ried out dur­ing my PhD at the Insti­tut de Recher­che en Bio­lo­gie Végétale, Uni­ver­sity of Montreal, and Montreal Botan­ic­al Garden, under the ment­or­ship of Simon Joly.

The study was driv­en by a desire to bet­ter under­stand how vari­ation with­in spe­cies shapes broad­er evol­u­tion­ary pat­terns. Centered on the niche vari­ation hypo­thes­is, we explored how the broad­er eco­lo­gic­al niches of gen­er­al­ist spe­cies may lead to great­er mor­pho­lo­gic­al diversity—either through the pres­ence of diverse spe­cial­ists with­in a spe­cies or through relaxed select­ive pres­sures on true gen­er­al­ist individuals.

Focus­ing on Anti­llean Gesneriaceae—a trop­ic­al plant group that has repeatedly transitioned between pol­lin­a­tion by hum­ming­birds and gen­er­al­ist systems—we examined how flor­al shape, par­tic­u­larly corolla tubu­lar­ity and curvature, var­ies with­in spe­cies. Using geo­met­ric morpho­met­rics, ances­tral recon­struc­tions, and meth­ods that dif­fer­ently accoun­ted for the high dimen­sion­al­ity of mor­pho­lo­gic­al traits, the ances­tral recon­struc­tion of pol­lin­a­tion syn­dromes over time, and the error asso­ci­ated with the estim­a­tion of the intraspe­cif­ic vari­ance, we eval­u­ated pat­terns of intraspe­cif­ic variation.

Our find­ings par­tially sup­port the niche vari­ation hypo­thes­is. While gen­er­al­ists showed more vari­ation over­all, espe­cially in tubu­lar­ity, not all aspects of flor­al shape fol­lowed this trend. Moreover, account­ing for sampling error high­lighted the import­ance of robust data­sets in evol­u­tion­ary studies.

This research under­scores the dynam­ic inter­play between eco­lo­gic­al strategies and mor­pho­lo­gic­al evol­u­tion and high­lights how pol­lin­at­or inter­ac­tions can influ­ence biod­iversity pat­terns across scales.

Quinn McCal­lum

I’m hon­oured to accept the Ste­arns Gradu­ate Stu­dent Prize for this research, which I con­duc­ted at UBC as part of my Honour’s thes­is under Dr. Dar­ren Irwin. Our goal with this study was to char­ac­ter­ize pat­terns of gen­om­ic dif­fer­en­ti­ation between Zono­tri­chia atri­ca­pilla (the Golden-crowned Spar­row) and Zono­tri­chia leu­co­phrys (the White-crowned Spar­row) using Gen­o­typ­ing-by-Sequen­cing (GBS). Pre­vi­ous work had found that these spe­cies share mito­chon­dri­al hap­lo­types des­pite marked dif­fer­ences in phen­o­type and allozyme sequences, a pat­tern attrib­uted to mito­chon­dri­al intro­gres­sion. Con­trast­ingly, we uncovered extremely high rel­at­ive dif­fer­en­ti­ation and increased abso­lute dif­fer­en­ti­ation across a large region of the Z‑chromosome, sug­gest­ing a region that has res­isted intro­gres­sion between these spe­cies. Fur­ther­more, pat­terns of link­age dis­equi­lib­ri­um in this region were con­sist­ent with reduced recom­bin­a­tion between the two spe­cies, but not with­in each spe­cies, a pat­tern that may be the res­ult of a chro­mo­somal inver­sion. Addi­tion­ally, we found evid­ence of admix­ture between two pre­vi­ously allo­patric sub­spe­cies of Z. leu­co­phrys. Broadly, I’m inter­ested in how eco­lo­gic­al traits and geo­graph­ic­al fea­tures influ­ence diver­si­fic­a­tion, the gen­om­ic archi­tec­ture of loc­al adapt­a­tion and repro­duct­ive isol­a­tion, and intro­gres­sion as source of adapt­ive genet­ic vari­ation. For my PhD, I’ve moved to Louisi­ana State Uni­ver­sity, where I’m advised by Dr. Nich­olas Mason. My cur­rent research uses com­par­at­ive phylo­geo­graphy to study how eco­lo­gic­al and life his­tory traits affect pop­u­la­tion struc­ture and gene flow in high Andean birds.

Kane Strat­man

It was an hon­or to receive the Ste­arns Prize for my recent study, which con­cluded my PhD research on the dynam­ics of sexu­al selec­tion on the well-known high-energy mat­ing call of male East­ern Gray Treefrogs (Hyla ver­sicol­or). My advisor Ger­linde Hoebel and I aimed to quanti­fy the dis­par­ity between a) what male advert­isers are cap­able of dis­play­ing and b) what female choosers seek in an ideal mate. We focused not on pop­u­la­tion-level estim­ates of pref­er­ence, but rather on pat­terns of with­in-pop­u­la­tion level pref­er­ences, which may cap­ture con­flict­ing but bio­lo­gic­ally mean­ing­ful mate choice dynam­ics. Our study revealed that, across three sep­ar­ate ele­ments of a male treefro­g’s mat­ing sig­nal, at most 62% of indi­vidu­al females exhib­it pref­er­ences con­sist­ent with the pop­u­la­tion aver­age. In the case of a male’s call­ing rate, we dis­covered a nearly dicho­tom­ous female response to high intens­ity call val­ues, greatly com­plic­at­ing any mod­el of male mat­ing strategy in this sys­tem. Pop­u­la­tion estim­ates of sexu­al selec­tion on any giv­en advert­ise­ment trait may, as we demon­strate, accur­ately mod­el the dir­ec­tion of selec­tion, whilst miss­ing entirely the primary basis for mat­ing decisions in the wild. Hid­den vari­ation in mat­ing pref­er­ences among-choosers may explain why lower res­ol­u­tion meas­ures of pref­er­ence shapes sig­ni­fic­antly under­es­tim­ate vari­ation in male fitness.

2023 Winners

Mat­thew C. Farnitano

I am inter­ested in pat­terns of repro­duct­ive isol­a­tion across pop­u­la­tions and spe­cies groups, includ­ing how and why they vary. Mon­key­flowers are a great and diverse sys­tem to study repro­duct­ive isol­a­tion, but most work in the group has focused on just a few mod­el taxa. This study, con­duc­ted as part of my Ph.D. with advisor Dr. Andrea Swe­igart at the Uni­ver­sity of Geor­gia, arose out of a col­lab­or­at­ive effort to expand our under­stand­ing of repro­duct­ive isol­a­tion across a lar­ger num­ber of mon­key­flower spe­cies groups. We chose a group of spe­cies with very little pre­vi­ous inform­a­tion, and char­ac­ter­ized pat­terns of gen­om­ic diver­gence and diversity, post­mat­ing repro­duct­ive isol­a­tion, and poten­tial hybrid­iz­a­tion. We found that repro­duct­ive isol­a­tion in this group, par­tic­u­larly hybrid seed invi­ab­il­ity, is very strong and pre­vents ongo­ing gene flow, though we do detect sig­nals of his­tor­ic­al gene flow in the group. Hybrid seed invi­ab­il­ity in this group is asso­ci­ated with dif­fer­ences in par­ent­al seed size, in con­trast to oth­er well-stud­ied cases of seed invi­ab­il­ity in mon­key­flowers, which may implic­ate selec­tion on seed size as an indir­ect driver of repro­duct­ive isol­a­tion.  I went to Duke Uni­ver­sity for my under­gradu­ate edu­ca­tion, where I fell in love with both wild­flowers and evol­u­tion­ary genet­ics. After gradu­at­ing, I worked as a labor­at­ory tech­ni­cian in a Phlox evol­u­tion lab with Dr. Robin Hop­kins at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity, before start­ing my Ph.D. work at the Uni­ver­sity of Geor­gia. In addi­tion to this study, my Ph.D. work has examined how repro­duct­ive isol­a­tion and admix­ture pat­terns vary across space, time, and the gen­ome with­in pop­u­la­tions of hybrid­iz­ing monkeyflowers.

Jason R. Laurich

I am hon­oured to receive a Ste­arns Prize for this research, which was con­duc­ted dur­ing my PhD research at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto, Canada with my advisor Dr. Megan Fre­d­er­ick­son and sev­er­al won­der­ful under­gradu­ate co-authors. This research paper stemmed from a need to bet­ter under­stand the con­sequences of the diversity and abund­ance of mutu­al­isms plants engage in in nature. Mul­tiple mutu­al­isms, asso­ci­ations between a single host and mul­tiple part­ner spe­cies, are ubi­quit­ous in plants, which often asso­ci­ate with pol­lin­at­ing, seed-dis­pers­ing, and defens­ive arth­ro­pod mutu­al­ists. These part­ners can impose con­flict­ing selec­tion pres­sures that alter their focal host’s evol­u­tion­ary tra­ject­ory. Here, I set out to invest­ig­ate genet­ic cor­rel­a­tions among traits asso­ci­ated with mat­ing sys­tem, biot­ic defence, pol­lin­a­tion, and seed dis­pers­al mutu­al­ism in the trop­ic­al weed Turn­era ulmi­fo­lia. Using just under 200 T. ulmi­fo­lia gen­o­types col­lec­ted from across Jamaica, we fit genet­ic vari­ance-cov­ari­ance (G) matrices to mutu­al­ist­ic and repro­duct­ive trait data using Bayesian meth­ods and found sig­ni­fic­ant pos­it­ive genet­ic cor­rel­a­tions among traits asso­ci­ated with out-cross­ing, pol­lin­a­tion, and biot­ic defence. These pat­terns are con­sist­ent with genet­ic facil­it­a­tion in the evol­u­tion of plant-arth­ro­pod mutu­al­isms, and hint at pat­terns of cor­rel­ated selec­tion on flor­al mor­pho­logy, pol­lin­a­tion, and the defence of key plant tis­sues. Assess­ing vari­ation in G at a loc­al scale using our largest pop­u­la­tions, we found few dif­fer­ences in the mag­nitude and ori­ent­a­tion of G, and that loc­al dif­fer­ences were con­sist­ent with diver­gence among the genet­ic lines of least resistance.

Tian Xia

This study mainly explores the impact of inter­spe­cif­ic inter­ac­tions on the dif­fer­en­ti­ation of pop­u­la­tions with­in a spe­cies. For this reas­on, I selec­ted two ground beetle spe­cies that are exper­i­en­cing sec­ond­ary con­tact as the mod­el for this study. The two spe­cies are Car­abus maiy­as­anus and C. iwawaki­anus, which are well known to have the gen­it­al lock-and-key sys­tem. I espe­cially focused on the former spe­cies that rep­res­ents dif­fer­en­ti­ation in gen­it­al mor­pho­lo­gies among pop­u­la­tions (i.e., repro­duct­ive char­ac­ter dis­place­ment, pos­sibly via rein­force­ment), and I wondered this will lead to the ini­tial spe­ci­ation with­in the spe­cies (the cas­cade rein­force­ment hypo­thes­is). This study provides some empir­ic­al sup­port for this hypo­thes­is, and I hope it can inspire future related research and provide new ideas for vari­ous ways in spe­ci­ation studies.

2022 Winners

Haley Kenyon

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

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

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.

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.

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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).

2014 – Run­ners-up were Kay Lucek and Sean Lee.