SMBE Graduate Student Excellence Awards

Graduate Student Excellence Awards

The SMBE Graduate Student Excellence Award honors the best presentation at the Graduate Student Excellence symposium, which provides a forum for young investigators to showcase their exemplary research at the annual meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE).

Eligibility: Current graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who received their primary doctoral-level degree no earlier than one year prior to the start of the annual meeting of the society (minus any career disruption or delay). A candidate for the award must become a member of the Society at least a month before the first day of the annual meeting. Approximately eight winners will be selected every year to cover the broad spectrum of research covered by SMBE.

2022 Winners:

Agneesh Barua, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, Onna, Okinawa, Japan - The evolutionary origins of venom: How nature created the perfect chemical weapon

Diana Cruz Dávalos, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland & Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Lausanne, Switzerland - Indigenous peoples in eastern Brazil: insights from 19th century genomes and metagenomes

Robert Driver, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, USA - Dynamic evolution of olfactory receptor repertoires across avian ecology and phylogeny

Steven Fiddaman, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom - Archaeological samples reveal the origins of extreme virulence in Marek’s disease virus

Christopher Kyriazis, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA - Genomic underpinnings of population persistence in Isle Royale moose

Jacob Steenwyk, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA - Genes of a feather evolve together: how gene coevolution provides insight into cellular and genomic structure and function

Wendy Valencia-Montoya, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom & Harvard University, Cambridge, USA - Adaptive introgression between local and invasive Helicoverpa sister species

Jessica Warren, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA - Loss and integration: tracing the functional replacement of mitochondrial tRNA genes

Caroline Weisman, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA - Lineage-specific genes: novelty or noise?

Past Recipients

Year	Name	Title
2021	Catarina Branco, Biomedical Research Center (CINBIO), University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain. Department of Biochemistry, Genetics and Immunology, University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain	Influence of the Last Glacial Period on the genetic diversity of current Southeast Asians
2021	Ian Vasconcellos Caldas, Department of Computational Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA	Inferring selective sweep parameters through supervised learning
2021	Alida de Flamingh, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA	Sourcing Elephant Ivory from a Sixteenth-Century Portuguese Shipwreck
2021	Michelle P Harwood, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Toronto, Ontario, Canada	Recombination and population demographics impact allele-specific-expression of deleterious variants in human populations
2021	Amanda Kowalczyk, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA	Pan-mammalian analysis of molecular constraints underlying extended lifespan in mammals
2021	Yeonwoo Park, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA	Historical memory, epistasis, and contingency in long-term protein evolution
2021	Thea F. Rogers, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom	Sex-specific selection drives the evolution of alternative splicing in birds
2021	Mengyi Sun, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA	Preferred synonymous codons are more accurately translated: proteomic evidence, among-species variation, and mechanistic basis
2020	Hannes Dittberner, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany	Blessing or curse? Evolutionary significance of gene-flow between two endangered plant species
2020	Malgorzata Gazda, CIBIO, University of Porto, Vairão, Portugal	A generic mechanism for sexual dichromatism in birds
2020	Elora López, Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, United States	Within-colony variation and the heritability of somatic mutations in clonal, colonial corals
2020	Alina G. Mikhaylova, Center for Mitochondrial Functional Genomics, Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, Kaliningrad, Russian Federation	Mitochondrial mutational spectrum in poikilothermic versus homeothermic vertebrates: effects of the temperature and lifespan
2020	Rachel Moran, Program in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, United States	Genomic resources for darters (Percidae: Etheostominae) provide insight into postzygotic barriers implicated in speciation
2020	Emily Roycroft, School of BioSciences, The University Of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia	Museum genomics unlocks a historical record of extinction in Australia
2020	Matthew Shepherd, Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom	Gene regulatory network evolution through the rewiring of transcription factors in a bacterial experimental model
2019	Matthew R Jones, University of Montana, Missoula, USA	The origin and spread of locally adaptive seasonal camouflage in snowshoe hares
2018	Harry Kemble, INSERM, France	The mechanistic basis of epistatic variety in a metabolic pathway uncovered by high-resolution fitness interaction mapping
2017	Anna Vickrey, University of Utah, USA	Domestic pigeon’s checkered past: wing color pattern variation is associated with one gene, two mechanisms, and interspecific introgression
2016	Katya Kosheleva, Harvard University, USA	Weakly selected standing variants dominate adaptation for 1000 generations in sexual, laboratory evolved yeast populations
2015	Aline Muyle, Université Lyon 1, Lyon, France.	Evolution of dosage compensation in the dioecious plant Silene latifolia.
2014	Alex Cagan, Max Planck Institute, Leipzig, Germany	Genetic variants underlying tameness and agression.
2013	Karen Wong Miller, UC Berkeley, USA	Genome-Wide Scans Reveal a Young Candidate Speciation Gene in Drosophila athabasca.
2012	Elizabeth Perry, University Of Oregon, USA	Repeatability in evolution varies with scale, organism, and the nature of selection.
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.
2006	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.
1997	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.
1994	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.

Award Information

Eligibility: Current graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who received their primary doctoral-level degree no earlier than one year prior to the start of the annual meeting of the society (minus any career disruption or delay). A candidate for the award must become a member of the Society at least a month before the first day of the annual meeting. Approximately eight winners will be selected every year to cover the broad spectrum of research covered by SMBE.

Application Requirements:

An abstract (250 word max) for the proposed presentation.

A Curriculum Vitae.

Application: Via the abstract submission system for the annual meeting for which the award applies.

Contest: A committee convened by the SMBE Council will choose eight finalists from among the applications. Each selected finalist will present a 15-minute talk in the SMBE Graduate Student Excellence Awards Symposium at the annual meeting. All finalists will receive a $500 award.

Graduate Student Excellence Awards

Past Recipients

Award Information

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