SEB Glasgow 2009 - President's Medallists
The President's Medals are awarded annually to young researchers of outstanding merit, and a presentation of medals to winners by the Society's President takes place at the Annual Main Meeting. The winners in 2009 are listed below.
Animal Section Medallist
Jeffrey G. Richards (University of British Columbia)
The goal of my current research program is to understand the relationship between plasticity and adaptive variation in the mechanisms that initiate, maintain, and coordinate metabolic energy balance in animals during exposure to environmental stress. Specifically, my laboratory is interested in the mechanisms that allow some animals to survive low environmental oxygen levels (termed hypoxia) while others succumb and die. To accomplish this goal, my students use a number of new and exciting model systems to understand the responses of animals to hypoxia from an evolutionary, ecological, behavioural, physiological, biochemical, and molecular perspective. This integrative approach for understanding adaptation has emerged as a product of the excellent training I received during my undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral years as well as from the influence of many close colleagues, friends, and students.
My academic interests in how animals respond to environmental change were first piqued during my undergraduate degree at Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario, Canada. At Wilfrid Laurier I had the pleasure to work with the late Prof. Richard (Rick) Playle who took a naïve, untested undergrad into his laboratory to start to teach him how to apply numbers biological phenomenon. From my B.Sc., I officially moved to the University of Waterloo and continued to work with Rick on the physiological effects of combined metal exposures on fish. After completing my M.Sc. degree I changed research directions and undertook a Ph.D. with Prof. Chris Wood at McMaster University examining the biochemical regulation of fuel selection in fish muscle during exercise. Following the completion of my Ph.D. I joined Dr. Trish Schulte’s lab at the University of British Columbia and focused on the molecular underpinnings of the responses of animals to environmental change. After two years of post-doc I was fortunate to be given an Assistant Professorship in the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia where I currently reside.
At this point, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to and continues to contribute to my development as a researcher. First and foremost, I thank my graduate students for their unbridled enthusiasm and curiosity. I’m also extremely indebted to all of my previous supervisors for giving me an opportunity to explore my interests in a rewarding and challenging environment. Finally, I thank all of my collaborators and close friends for continually challenging me to expand my horizons and think about how animals respond to environmental change from every possible angle.
Cell Section Medallist
Tom Richards, University of Exeter
Tom graduated from University College, London in 1999 (B.Sc. Human Sciences) where he became interested in using genetic data to understand evolution and evolutionary history. After his undergraduate degree he worked in the Galton Laboratory, at UCL, on sexual selection in stalk-eyed flies with Dr Tracey Chapman and Professor Andrew Pomiankowski. He then spent six months working in the USA, at the New York Center for Studies on the Origins of Life, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, initially sponsored by a NASA Planetary Biology Internship. Whilst in the US he looked at the diversity and evolution of group I self-splicing introns in deep sub-surface bacteria and became fascinated by how microbial cells evolved.
Tom returned to the UK for postgraduate study in 2000, including aD.Phil. in the Departments of Zoology at the University of Oxford and the Natural History Museum, London, supervised by Professors Martin Embley and Tom Cavalier-Smith. The subject of his thesis was the eukaryotic tree of life and the role of horizontal gene transfer in protozoa. In 2005 he joined the University of Exeter working with Professor Nick Talbot on the role of horizontal gene transfer in the evolution of osmotrophic life-styles. In 2007 he was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to develop his interests in motor protein evolution, eukaryote phylogeny, and horizontal gene transfer. Nowthe primary focus of his research is to determine the diversity and evolutionary relationships of the eukaryotes and the cellular and genomic innovations associated with the emergence and diversification of the eukaryotic cell.
Tom has established his own research group including two postdoctoral researchers, funded by the BBSRC and NERC, and four postgraduate students. Dr Meredith Jones (funded by NERC) uses environmental DNA methodologies to investigate novel branches on the eukaryotic tree of life. A BBSRC funded postdoctoral researcher will use next generation technologies to sequence the genomes of divergent fungi with very different cellular characteristics in order to investigate ancient fungal cell evolution. Guy Leonard is conducting his Ph.D. studies on the use of whole genome datasets to resolve contentious phylogenetic relationships, while Luigi Cibrario (funded by the BBSRC) is reconstructing the evolution and functional diversification of endocytic organelles in the fungi. Theresa Hudson (funded by NERC and Forest Research) is using high throughput parallel sequence technologies to understand microbial diversity from soil environments, with the aim to better understand the diversity of microbial life and how that relates to the tree of life. Yuan Liu is investigating the evolution of the eukaryotic DNA replisome, while James Harrison, who will shortly be joining Tom’s group, will work on the endosymbiotic ancestry of novel algal forms. Tom currently focuses on projects relating to the diversity of eukaryotic life and the tree of life, motor protein evolution, and the role of horizontal gene transfer in the evolution of trophic mechanisms in eukaryotic microbes.
Tom would like to thank all his past supervisors and mentors, particularly Nick Talbot. He would also like to thank his research group, particularly Merry Jones for keeping the group moving. Finally, he would like to thank his funders:Leverhulme Trust, BBSRC, NERC, CoSyst, BiodivERsA (Framework 6 - EU) and the Systematics Association.
Education and Public Affairs Medallist
Teresa Valencak (Veterinary University Vienna)
As a teenager, Teresa had the vision of travelling around the globe while reporting on pleasing stories as a successful journalist for popular scientific magazines. In real life however, Teresa studied bioland became an Animal physiologist in 2007. Attached to the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology in Vienna (where she also did her PhD on membrane fatty acid composition in mammals), she easily made the acquaintance of local hunters and was sensitised to their emerging interest in scientific work. Thus, she started reporting on her projects and related themes in Austria’s hunting magazine realising that not only this engagement was fruitful for and broadened her own work but she also enjoyed being reminded of her youthful dream.
At one stage, Teresa’s first (and that time only) scientific paper was chosen for and described in “Outside JEB”, the popular section of the Journal of Experimental Biology. Being impressed by the appealing but still informative style of Outside reports, and regularly reading the column, she volunteered to write for Outside JEB. Picking and summarising brand new outstanding papers in the field of experimental biology was a fascinating extension for her daily routine as a PhD student and afterwards. Due to this commitment for JEB, Teresa could greatly improve both her writing and her English. Thereby she was able to successfully replicate her first scientific paper while even extending her science communication hobby. Teresa is continuously contributing to hunting magazines, invites newspaper journalists to bring her scientific results to a broader public and takes part in open- day events at her home institution.
Apart from membrane composition, Teresa studied physiological limits in lactating European brown hares during the last few years. In March 2008, she was appointed Principle Investigator for a 3-year project which addresses the relationship between reproduction, oxidative stress and lifespan in laboratory mice. Apart from research and science communication, she is teaching a course on comparative physiology at the Veterinary University in Vienna for students both in veterinary medicine, biology and related disciplines.
Teresa would like to thank all her mentors at JEB for their support and criticisms on Austrian- English over the years as well as her advisors in Vienna. Last but not least she acknowledges the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), who funded her during her PhD and awarded her a “Hertha Firnberg” fellowship which enables her to follow her research ideas and communicating them to the broader public.
Plant Section Medallist
Jan Lohman (University of Heidelberg)
During my undergraduate studies I had already become fascinated with the molecular mechanisms governing cell behavior and development. Consequently, I began to work on cell-cell communication and axis formation in Hydra, a simple animal model-system, in which these questions were easily tractable and continued this work during my Ph.D. in the lab of Thomas Bosch at the University of Munich, Germany. However, the possibilities for functional studies in Hydra were very limited and thus I was looking for alternatives to extend my studies to genetic and genomic level. Work on plants seemed very attractive because of their remarkable developmental plasticity and the large experimental toolbox available and I grabbed the opportunity to work on Arabidopsis floral patterning in the lab of Detlef Weigel at the Salk Institute in San Diego, USA. The stimulating atmosphere of the plant biology community at Salk and Detlefs mentoring not only allowed me to quickly gain footing in this competitive field of science, but also opened avenues for me to develop my own research program. Starting from the finding that stem cell regulation and floral patterning are mechanistically linked, I decided to study the interaction of the core meristem regulatory system with other pathways of plant development more systematically. I was able to do so in my own lab at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tuebingen, Germany, in Detlef Weigels newly founded department. The resources afforded by this environment allowed us to successfully apply methods of systems biology to many aspects of meristem regulation and yielded intriguing new insights. Recently my lab moved to the University of Heidelberg, Germany, where I have been appointed Professor of stem cell biology. We will continue to study how the regulatory machinery of the meristem is integrated with organism-wide signaling pathways to synchronize the growth pattern of the plant with environmental conditions.