The Walter M. Fitch Award

Beginning with the first annual meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE) in 1993, the Walter M. Fitch Symposium has provided a forum for young investigators to showcase their exemplary research. The Walter M. Fitch Award honors the best presentation at this symposium.

Walter Fitch was a pioneer in many areas of molecular evolution, in particular the methodology of phylogenetic reconstruction, the estimation of genetic distances, the study of rate constancy in proteins and DNA sequences, the evolution of codon usage, and retroviral evolution. He also made significant contributions to virology, the origin of life, taxonomy, genetics, and molecular biology. For his work, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Linnean Society. With Masatoshi Nei, he co-founded the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, and served as editor-in-chief for its first 10 years. He also co-founded the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution and served as its first president.

Walter Monroe Fitch was born in San Diego, California, on May 21, 1929. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1953 and a Ph.D. in comparative biochemistry in 1958. He was a post-doctoral scholar at both Stanford and University College (London), and held full professorships at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Southern California. He came to University of California, Irvine in 1989 as a Distinguished Professor and later became the Chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Walter M. Fitch died on March 11, 2011, at the age of 81.

Eligibility

Members of the SMBE, who are either current graduate students or postdoctoral researchers, who received their primary doctoral-level degree not earlier than a year prior to the convention of the annual meeting of the society, are eligible to apply. A candidate for the award must become member of the Society at least a month before the first day of the annual meeting.

Application

At the time of registration to an annual meeting, an applicant should submit an abstract and indicate his/her interest in this award.

Selection

Before each annual meeting, eight individuals, henceforth referred to as contestants, are selected to present a lecture on the basis of the submitted abstracts.

Travel Awards

Each selected contestant receives a travel award to help him/her attend the annual meeting.

Presentation

Each selected contestant presents a 15-minute talk in the Walter M. Fitch Symposium. Based on these presentations, a winner is chosen by an anonymous expert panel and awarded the Walter M. Fitch Prize. The expert panel may decide to award the prize to several contestants. All contestants also receive a year an online student/postdoc MBE subscription.

Deadline

The deadline for abstract submission is determined by the organizers of each annual meeting.

Walter M. Fitch Award Winners

Year	Name	Title
2011	Kerry Geiler-Samerotte Harvard University, USA	The selective cost of misfolded protein toxicity and a concomitant evolutionary adaptation.
2010	Takashi Tsuchimatsu University of Zurich, Switzerland	Evolution of self-compatibility in Arabidopsis thaliana by a mutation in the male specificity gene.
2009	Joshua Bayes Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, USA	The molecular basis of hybrid sterility caused by the hybrid sterility gene Odysseus.
2008	Jean-François Gout Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France	Translational control of intron splicing in eukaryotes.
2007	David Des Marais Duke University, USA	Gene duplication allows substrate specialization in a biosynthetic enzyme.
2006	Jennifer Cork North Carolina State University, USA	Characterizing three candidate balanced polymorphisms in Arabidopsis thaliana: a reverse genetics approach.
	Joanna Kelley University of Washington, USA	Positive selection in primate tooth enamelin and evidence for human population specific adaptation.
2005	Leslie Collins Massey University, New Zealand	Cutting it in the RNA World: the spliceosome and splicing in ancestral eukaryotes.
2004	Barbara Engelhardt University of California at Berkeley, USA	Protein function prediction using a Bayesian model of molecular function evolution.
2003	Yoav Gilad Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany	Loss of olfactory receptor genes is coupled to the acquisition of full trichromatic color vision.
2002	Ying Chen University of Munich, Germany	Functional analysis of phylogenetically conserved sequence elements in intron 1 of the Drosophila melanogaster Adh gene.
2001	Jeffrey Townsend Harvard University, USA	Global gene expression variation in natural isolates of Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
2000	Eric A. Gaucher University of Florida, USA	Functional analysis of proteins using covarion-based evolutionary approaches: elongation factors.
1999	Dennis Lavrov University of Michigan, USA	Arthropod phylogeny based on gene arrangement and other characters from mitochondrial DNA.
1998	Mark Siegal Harvard University, USA	Functional evolutionary analysis of genes coplaced into the Drosophila genome.
1997	Christiane Biermann State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA	Sequence variation in the sea urchin sperm protein BINDIN is generated by recombination and length mutations.
	Paul Taylor University of Leicester, UK	Diversity and mutational analyses of the Y-specific mini-satellite, MSY1.
1996	Dmitri A. Petrov Harvard University, USA	Birth and death of processed pseudogenes in Drosophila: Molecular evolution of a non-LTR retrotransposable element.
1995	Hiroki Oota University of Tokyo, Japan	Phylogenetic analysis of 2,000 year old human remains of Japan (Yayoi period) based on mitochondrial DNA sequences.
1994	Alan Cooper Smithsonian Institution, USA	Avian evolution in New Zealand as revealed by mitochondrial DNA.
	Janet Kornegay University of California at Berkeley, USA	Molecular adaptation of a leaf-eating bird: stomach lysozyme of the hoatzin.
1993	Youn-Ho Lee University of California at San Diego, USA	The divergence of species-specific abalone sperm lysin is promoted by positive Darwinian selection: implications regarding speciation.