President's Medallists 2012
The SEB President's Medals are awarded annually to young scientists of outstanding merit. The awards are presented at the Annual Main Meeting of the Society - taking place this year in Salzburg, Austria from the 29th June - 2nd July. There is one award per section of the Society (Animal; Cell; Plant; Education & Public Affairs).
Our congratulations to our very worthy winners of the 2012 SEB President's Medal awards! The winners are:
Animal Section - Graham Scott (McMaster University)
An inspiring physiology course taught by Chris Wood led Graham to switch his degree to biology after three years studying engineering at McMaster University in Canada. He went on to do an honours thesis project with Chris and Kath Sloman which instilled in him a passion for comparative physiology.
Graham’s graduate training was at the University of British Columbia, where he developed strong interests in evolutionary physiology. In 2004 he completed an MSc with Trish Schulte on the mechanisms and evolution of salinity tolerance in killifish followed by a PhD in 2009 with Bill Milsom on high-altitude adaptation in bar-headed geese. During this time, Graham also undertook collaborative projects on hypoxia tolerance in fish from the Amazon and fieldwork on bar-headed geese in Asia. This was a very inspiring time thanks to his mentors and collaborators and to the exciting environment at UBC for studying comparative physiology. A postdoc followed in St Andrews with Ian Johnston studying the mechanisms of temperature acclimation in zebrafish and in 2011 Graham returned to McMaster as an Assistant Professor.
Graham’s research continues to explore how the respiratory and metabolic systems of vertebrates respond to environmental stress, particularly hypoxia and temperature change, and how physiological systems evolve to improve performance during stress. Graham’s work covers levels of biological organization from organism to physiological system to genome across a range of species.
Graham’s thanks goes to all his mentors and collaborators for the exciting research opportunities and for their of support. He would also like to thank all the funding agencies that have supported him, in particular NSERC of Canada.
Cell Section - Ive de Smet (University of Nottingham)
I
ve De Smet carried out his doctoral work on the control of lateral root development in Arabidopsis with Tom Beeckman at the VIB Department of Plant Systems Biology, Ghent University, Belgium. Then he did his postdoctoral studies on asymmetric cell division of the Arabidopsis zygote with Gerd Jürgens at the Centre for Plant Molecular Biology, University of Tübingen, Germany, and the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen. Currently, his newly established research group at the University of Nottingham, UK, focuses on ligand–receptor kinase interactions in root development.
Education and Public Affairs Section - Anne Osterrieder (Oxford Brookes University)
Anne started her undergraduate studies in Biology at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich and then switched to the Technical University Munich to join their Genetics programme. During her work on maize secondary metabolism with Dr Monika Frey, Anne became interested in plants and especially in their cell biology. After finishing her “Diplom” thesis, she joined Prof Chris Hawes’ group at Oxford Brookes University to learn more about plant cells, fluorescent proteins and bioimaging (which, really, is a code word for “playing with fancy microscopes”). In her PhD thesis Anne studied the role of putative Golgi matrix proteins in the formation of the plant Golgi apparatus. She continued her work at Oxford Brookes as a BBSRC-funded postdoctoral research assistant and focused on characterizing tethering factors at the Golgi-endoplasmic reticulum interface. Over the last year she has been working on the morphology of transgenic Golgi plants and on establishing an optical trapping system in collaboration with the Central Laser Facility (STFC).
During her PhD Anne became involved with outreach by demonstrating microscopes to schools, in “Science and Art” workshops for students and teachers and to children in the first “Brookes Science Bazaar” in 2009. In the following years she organized the group’s microscopy activities for the Bazaar and, at the same time, started to produce science music videos and share them on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/plantendomembrane). Anne also blogs about plants, cells and science (http://www.plantcellbiology.com) and is using social media websites such as Twitter and Google+ to share and discover scientific content. Anne has now taken over the role of “Faculty Outreach Coordinator” for a day per week alongside her research, which she enjoys immensely.
Anne would like to thank her current and past supervisors and colleagues for their support and expertise, and her “virtual” peers for daily inspiration. Anne’s research is carried out in collaboration with Dr Stan Botchway and Dr Andy Ward (Central Laser Facility, STFC, Harwell) and Dr Tijs Ketelaar and Dr Norbert de Ruijter (Wageningen Unversity) and has been funded by Oxford Brookes University and the BBSRC.
http://www.brookes.ac.uk/about/news/biologyaward
Plant Section - Heather Whitney (Bristol University)
Heather did her first degree at Imperial College London, following which she moved to the IACR-Long Ashton Research Station, University of Bristol to conduct a PhD under the supervision of Professors Johnathan Napier and John Pickett. From Bristol, Heather moved to the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge, where she was employed as a post-doctoral researcher investigating the production of pantothenate (vitamin B5) in plants. Heather stayed in Cambridge to undertake an interdisciplinary post-doctoral position looking at how the petal surface structure influences the behaviour of insect pollinators with Dr Beverley Glover and Professor Lars Chittka, which gave her the opportunity to both use plant molecular biology and learn animal behavioural methods . A six month MRC ‘discipline-hopping’ fellowship in to the lab of Professor Ullrich Steiner (Department of Physics, University of Cambridge), gave Heather further opportunities to collaboratively develop biomimetic and optical methods for analysing how the plant surface reflects light. Heather returned to Bristol in 2008 when she was awarded a Lloyd’s of London Tercentenary Trust fellowship, and is currently funded by an ERC starting grant to investigate the production of iridescence in plants.
Heather would like to acknowledge the huge amount of support she has got from past and current supervisors and mentors, and is grateful for their ongoing encouragement.
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/biology/news/2011/180.html
http://www.womeninscience.co.uk/shortlist.php