The European Society for Evolutionary Biology has established The John Maynard Smith Prize to be awarded to outstanding young researchers in the field of evolutionary biology.
Starting from 2009 the Prize also includes a Junior Fellowship of generally 3 months at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany. Information about the fellowship can be found here
For more information on Junior Fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, or information on this institution, contact: Paul Schmid-Hempel.
Tanja Schwander completed her undergraduate studies in population genetics and zoology at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2003. She stayed at the University of Lausanne to do her Master thesis with Michel Chapuisat on worker size polymorphism and division of labour in ants and continued with a PhD with Laurent Keller and Sara Helms Cahan. During her doctoral dissertation she investigated the evolution and maintenance of the genetic basis for queen and worker caste differentiation in Pogonomyrmex harvester ants, a species complex in which new queens are produced from within-lineage crosses whereas workers derive from between-lineage crosses.
The long standing view of the queen and worker caste determination processes in social insects was that each individual is fully totipotent, and that morphological and physiological differences between castes were solely under environmental control. Tanja Schwander conducted several key studies showing that this dogmatic view was incorrect. Her innovative research has provided strong evidence for the influence of genetic epistasis and maternal effects in the process of caste differentiation.
Tanja Schwander’s current research focuses on patterns and processes triggering transitions between reproductive systems in insects. At present, she is a postdoctoral fellow in Bernard Crespi’s group at Simon Fraser University, Canada, where she studies transitions from sexual reproduction to parthenogenesis in Timema walking stick insects. She applies a variety of approaches in order to link microevolutionary processes with phenotypic and macroevolutionary consequences of parthenogenesis.
Tanja Schwander's prize was celebrated at the ESEB congress in Torino, Italy, 2009 where she gave a plenary lecture on "Evolution of genetic caste determination in social insects". (Abstract)