We are delighted to announce this year’s Graduate Student Excellence Award winners and the winners of the Best Graduate Student Paper 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).

Catarina Branco, Biomedical Research Center (CINBIO), University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain. Department of Biochemistry, Genetics and Immunology, University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain

Title: Influence of the Last Glacial Period on the genetic diversity of current Southeast Asians

Ian Vasconcellos Caldas, Department of Computational Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

Title: Inferring selective sweep parameters through supervised learning

Alida de Flamingh, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA

Title: Sourcing Elephant Ivory from a Sixteenth-Century Portuguese Shipwreck

Michelle P Harwood, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Title: Recombination and population demographics impact allele-specific-expression of deleterious variants in human populations

Amanda Kowalczyk, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Title: Pan-mammalian analysis of molecular constraints underlying extended lifespan in mammals

Yeonwoo Park, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Title: Historical memory, epistasis, and contingency in long-term protein evolution

Thea F. Rogers, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

Title: Sex-specific selection drives the evolution of alternative splicing in birds

Mengyi Sun, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Title: Preferred synonymous codons are more accurately translated: proteomic evidence, among-species variation, and mechanistic basis

Best Graduate Student Paper

These awards provide recognition for outstanding student papers in both SMBE journals. All articles published in the two SMBE journals, Molecular Biology & Evolution and Genome Biology & Evolution, in the calendar year prior to the meeting are eligible for nomination. The best student paper of the year in each journal will receive the prize. 

Award recipients in 2021 for papers published in 2020:

For MBE, Winner:

Jana Helsen: Gene Loss Predictably Drives Evolutionary Adaptation

Runners-up:

Ana Marija Jaksic: Neuronal Function and Dopamine Signaling Evolve at
High Temperature in Drosophila

Jun Huang: A Simulation Study to Examine the Information Content in Phylogenomic Data Sets under the Multispecies Coalescent Model

Chao Zhang: ASTRAL-Pro: Quartet-Based Species-Tree Inference despite Paralogy

For GBE, Winner:

Tiffany Batarseh: Genetic Mutations That Drive Evolutionary Rescue to Lethal Temperature in Escherichia coli