Every year the European Society for Evolutionary Biology distinguishes an outstanding young evolutionary biologist with the John Maynard Smith Prize.
The prize winner is expected to attend the next ESEB congress, where he or she will deliver the John Maynard Smith Lecture. The Society will pay registration, accommodation, and travel expenses (economy fare). The Prize also includes the possibility of a Junior Fellowship of generally 3 months at the Institute of Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, Germany.
Further Junior Fellows for the Wissenschaftskolleg may be selected from the other applicants. For more information on Junior Fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, or information on this institution, see Institute of Advanced Study or contact Paul Schmid-Hempel, ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
Current and previous winners of the JMS Prize are listed below.
Tanja Stadler is a junior group leader at ETH Zurich (Switzerland).
Her work focuses on developing phylogenetic methodology such that, based on the increasing amount of molecular sequence data, past evolutionary and epidemiological processes can be inferred.
In particular, Tanja developed methodology to reliably estimate major shifts in past speciation and extinction rates, as well as to quantify the severity of spread of emerging viral diseases.
Tanja obtained a Master degree in Applied Mathematics from the Technical University of Munich in 2006. During her PhD with Anusch Taraz (TU Munich, Germany) and Mike Steel (Christchurch, New Zealand), she focused on developing models for speciation and extinction. In 2008, Tanja joined Sebastian Bonhoeffer's group (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) as a postdoc, where she started to develop and apply phylogenetic methods for answering questions in virus evolution and epidemiology.
Tanja's prize will be celebrated at the First Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology congress in Ottawa, Canada 2012 where she will give the John Maynard Smith Prize Lecture on "Looking at the present to learn about the past".(Abstract)
Daniel Matute is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, IL, US. His research has two conceptually related goals. First, he aims to understand how natural selection on the different levels of genes, organisms and species affect speciation, using Drosophila as a model system.
His plan is to combine a series of genetic analyses with natural collections and a population genomics approach to determine what genomic regions can cause reproductive isolation. Second, he want to test
whether generalizations about the evolution of reproductive isolation gleaned from model organisms also apply to organisms that have an immediate impact on human activities. This essentially will develop
“model species” and new lines of research for anybody interested in speciation in these medically and agriculturally relevant species
Daniel obtained a dual degree in biology and microbiology at Universidad de Los Andes in Columbia in 2005. He completed his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution with Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago in Spring 2010, focused on the genetic architecture of reproductive isolation in different species of Drosophila. In 2011, Daniel joined Molly Przeworski's lab as a postdoctoral researcher.
Daniel has been awarded for a Junior Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, Germany.