2019 Award Nominations: Pan-American Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology
Below, please find the nominations for this year's awards. Nominees are listed in alphabetical order by last name.
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* Please note that this page is not viewable by the general public, only by Executive Committee members who received the link and the password.
Place your votes by clicking here!
Rudolf A. Raff Memorial Pioneer Award
* Eric Haag
University of Maryland, College Park
Nominated by Leslie Pick
Nomination Rationale: No rationale provided to date
* Nipam Patel
Marine Biological Laboratory
Nominated by Ehab Abouheif & Gregory K. Davis
Nomination Rationale: As a pioneer of evodevo studies in multiple non-model arthropod species, Nipam H. Patel has made fundamental discoveries in both the evolution of developmental systems and the developmental basis of the evolution of morphology. Renowned early in his career for his technical prowess enlisting cross-reactive antibodies for comparative molecular embryology, Nipam showed us how the gene expression underlying segmentation has both remained conserved and evolved, often in cases where the embryology has changed dramatically. As many of the genes involved in the process of segmentation are also involved in neurogenesis, Nipam has made important contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the arthropod central nervous system. With a combination of descriptive work and functional studies in the amphipod Parhyale hawaiensis, Nipam has also provided us with deep insights into the role Hox genes play in the evolution of morphology. Nipam’s group continues to work on Hox genes, while also investigating germ line regeneration in Parhyale and structural color in butterflies.
* Mary Jane West-Eberhard
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
Nominated by Dave Angelini
Nomination Rationale: I would like to nominate Mary Jane West-Eberhard for consideration to the EvoDevoPanAm Pioneer Award. The award would recognize her research and theoretical contributions on the roles of developmental plasticity in evolution and her involvement in science in Latin America. West-Eberhard was born and educated in Michigan. She worked with the evolutionary zoologist Richard Alexander, receiving her PhD from the University of Michigan in 1967. She spent three years at Harvard as a postdoc with the entomologist Howard Evans, where she began studying the evolution of sociality in tropical wasps. In 1969, West-Eberhard took a research position at Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia, and in 1986 moved to a full-time position at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama where she worked until retirement in 2013. West-Eberhard's research drew attention to the importance of plasticity, including polyphenism and polymorphism, as well as behavioral plasticity, in evolution. She worked extensively with tropical paper wasps (*Polistes*), which also provided insights on social competition and sexual selection. She has authored more than 30 journal articles, most in top-tier journals, with thousands of citations. *Developmental Plasticity and Evolution*, published in 2003, was highly influential during the renaissance of evo-devo. The book encapsulated the idea that environmentally influenced phenotypic plasticity could be an important factor for evolutionary trajectories.
In addition to her research, West-Eberhard has been involved in numerous organizations promoting science and science education in Latin America including the Organization for Tropical Studies, the Monteverde Conservation League, the (Costa Rican) National Center for High Technology, the Costa Rican Section on Science and Technology, the (US) National Center for Science Education, the (US) National Academy of Sciences Committee on Human Rights. She has also served on the editorial boards of biological journals based in the US, Colombia and Costa Rica. West-Eberhard's scientific contributions have been recognized by several other organizations. She has been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences (1988), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1996), the Costa Rican National Academy of Sciences (2002), Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (2005), and the Animal Behavior Society (2009). The American Society of Naturalists presented her with the Sewell Wright Award in 2003. *Developmental Plasticity and Evolution* won the the American Association of Publishers's Hawkins Award for best scholarly book of 2003. She was the distinguished Hamilton Lecturer for the International Society of Behavioral Ecology in 2004. She received the Quest Award for Lifetime Achievement from Animal Behavior Society in 2012, and the Hamilton Award from International Union for the Study of Social Insects in 2014. West-Eberhard has been an important contributor to the intellectual basis of evo-devo and a person whose career is intrinsically connected to Latin America. Therefore, I believe she would be a worthy honoree for our society, especially this year, as we meet in Miami, a city which itself bridges the Americas.
Early Career Award
* Kim Cooper
University of California San Diego
Nominated by Dave Angelini
Nomination Rationale: No rationale provided to date
* Emma Farley
University of California San Diego Medical School
Nominated by Deirdre Lyons
Nomination Rationale: Emma's work has elegantly demonstrated that sub-optimization of enhancers is necessary for controlling precision in tissue-specific gene expression. Emma pioneered the techniques involved in generating these unbiased screens for finding functional enhancers, taking advantage of the compact genome and ability to electroporate embryos in the ascidian, Ciona. Her work has immediate and profound implications for other organisms, including humans. While most of the enhancer evolution field has been focusing on finding "conserved" binding sites for regulatory factors, Emma's approach has been to take a more difficult, but innovative, approach to identifying the "grammar" of enhancers. By developing the tools to study this language, she has defined a major path forward for the field.
* Patricia Schneider
Universidade de Para
Nominated by Rodrigo Nunes da Fonseca & Natalia Pabón-Mora
Nomination Rationale: No rationale provided to date
* Mansi Srivastava
Harvard University
Nominated independently by both Elena Kramer and Deirdre Lyons
Nomination Rationale (Kramer): I am writing to enthusiastically nominate Dr. Mansi Srivastava for the PASEDB Early Career Award. Dr. Srivastava is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, with a joint appointment as a curator in the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Dr. Srivastava’s research is at the forefront of contemporary evolutionary developmental biology and comparative genomics, particularly in the largely unexplored invertebrate phyla that populate the base of the evolutionary tree of multicellular animals. Her discoveries have yielded novel and important insights into the evolution of multicellular life and the evolutionary relationships among the major clades of animals. As a graduate student, she was the lead author of two papers, both published in Nature, which reported the first genomes of a sponge and a placozoan. These taxa are representative of the earliest evolved multicellular animals—which do not even have tissue-level organization—so these genomes are a remarkable contribution to our knowledge of the genomic diversity of animals. As a postdoctoral fellow, Mansi shifted to, and is currently focusing on, acoel worms. This is an extremely interesting animal group that sits at the base of the Bilateria. The acoels diverged prior to the evolution of a discrete excretory system and also before the divergence of protostomes (e.g., arthropods, annelids, mollusks) and deuterostomes (e.g., echinoderms, vertebrates). This makes acoels a crucial group for deciphering the characteristics of early animals as well as what is shared among assemblages of present day organisms, including humans. Another powerful aspect of this lineage is their capacity to undergo whole-body regeneration, a phenomenon that has fascinating implications for medical science.
Dr. Srivastava’s current research is aimed at understanding the evolutionary developmental biology of regeneration in acoels, specifically in the three-banded panther worm Hofstenia miamia, a system whose development she spear-headed while a postdoc. Her initial discoveries include the elucidation of the roles of Wnt and Bmp-Admp signaling in establishing the anterior-posterior and dorsal-ventral axes, respectively. This research is relevant both to the biology of regeneration in general and to our overall understanding of the diversity of life. On-going work in the lab combines genome sequencing with ATAC-seq, Drop-seq and RNA-seq to make rapid advances towards an understanding of the genome-wide regulatory landscape of whole-body regeneration. The potential of this approach to transform our understanding of acoel development and regeneration has been recognized with both a NIH NIGMS MIRA award and a NSF CAREER award, as well as a Smith Family Foundation Award for Excellence in Biomedical Research and a Searle Scholar Award. Thus, I feel that Dr. Srivastava fulfills multiple aspects of your criteria for an Early Career Award, including the application of innovative techniques to a classic question (regeneration) in the context of significant new taxonomic coverage and exceptional experimental skill. Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions
Nomination Rationale (Lyons): Mansi has been at the forefront of genomics studies of basally-branching metazoans since her graduate work. Her achievements in this area including leading the genome papers for sponge, tricoplax, acoel, and co-leading the Nematostella genome. In her post doc, she developed the acoel worm Hofstenia as a model for whole body regeneration, and showed that acoels are an out-group to all other Bilaterians. Hofstenia develop via embryos with defined cell lineages, making it possible to study the developmental origin of neoblasts, now a major focus on her lab. Another important contribution her lab is making is studying comparative regeneration from a whole-genome perspective, which will set the pace for the field.
* Yaowu Yuan
University of Connecticut
Nominated by Stacey Smith
Nomination Rationale: I’m writing to nominate Dr. Yaowu Yuan for the Pan-AM EvoDevo Early Career Award. I would like to state from the outset that I have no professional relationship with Dr. Yuan (i.e., as an advisor, collaborator, etc.). However, we study similar questions, and thus I know his work very well. I have known Dr. Yuan since about 2009, shortly after he finished his graduate work. He did his Phd with Dr. Richard Olmstead at the University of Washington in Seattle in the area of molecular evolution and phylogenetics. After completing his PhD, he began working as postdoc with Dr. Sue Wessler at the University of Georgia, where he researched transposase genes, leading to a first-authored publication in PNAS. He then returned to UW for a second postdoc with Dr. Toby Bradshaw. It was that point that Dr. Yuan started the research program for which he is now best known, one which uses the natural diversity in flower size, shape, and color in monkeyflowers to determine the genetic basis for variation. While many other researchers have developed new genetic tools in ‘nonmodel’ organisms, Dr. Yuan’s work stands out for his sheer tenacity in tackling even the most
complex traits, like floral patterning and shape. Dr. Yuan has been determined, since the time I first met him, to bring the research potential of model systems into wild species in order to address fundamental questions in evodevo. As a postdoc, he not only conducted standard association studies to identify the genetic basis for floral differences across Mimulus, but he also developed a collection of hundreds of chemically-induced mutants in multiple species. These mutants display many novel phenotypes but also mirror natural variants. His combination of forward and reverse genetic approaches has allowed him to dissect the genetic architecture of floral traits (e.g. Yuan et al. 2013) and discover previously unknown player in flower development (e.g., an actin gene controlling flower width, Ding et al. 2017). The ability to conduct the sorts of molecular genetic experiments in Mimulus that are generally restricted to model plants like Arabidopsis has surely taken a Herculean effort on the part of Dr. Yuan’s and his lab but has been central to his major advances.
In this context, I would like to highlight the impact of his findings in Mimulus for the field of plant evo-devo broadly. Ours is a field that has been often driven by findings in model systems which provide candidate genes for study in non-model systems. Although this approach has been effective for some deeply shared pathways (like the anthocyanin pigment biosynthesis), it has limited our research in terms of the traits amenable for study. By pushing the boundaries of functional research outside of classic genetic model organisms and commonly studied traits, Dr. Yuan has made discoveries the importance of which is hard to overstate. A stand-out in my mind is his work of the regulators of carotenoid biosynthesis. Carotenoids act as accessory pigments for photosynthesis and provide the red, yellow, and orange coloration of fruits and flowers (especially so-called nectar guides). Still, essentially nothing was known about the genes which regulate carotenoid production until the truly ground-breaking studies of Dr. Yuan and his lab (Sagawa et al. 2016; Stanley et al. 2017). By identifying these genes and their molecular function, these papers have opened a new door for comparative research in which we can begin to ask if the same regulators are involved in other taxa and thus may have been recruited for carotenoid regulation early in plant evolution. I believe that his newer work on the genetic basis for petal fusion (required for developing a tubular flower) will be similarly fundamental. Across these studies, a common theme in his research is linking molecular mechanisms and developmental processes to major questions in evolutionary biology. I’ve been particularly impressed with his contributions to our understanding of pattern formation (Yuan et al. 2016), overdominance (one of the mechanisms thought to underlie hybrid vigor) (LaFountain et al. 2017) and DNA transposition (Yuan and Wessler 2011). I believe that this ability to confront classic problems with innovative yet careful experimentation in natural systems will lead his work to receive increasing attention beyond the plant world. Indeed, this research program is already well represented in the literature, with 23 papers in leading journals (e.g., Molecular Biology and Evolution, Plant Cell, Genetics). He has also garnered significant extramural support, including a two sole PI awards from NSF-IOS and a recent collaborative NSF-EDGE grant, which will ensure the continued development of Mimulus as a model clade for evo-devo.
Given his major contributions to plant evo-devo as an early career researcher, I consider Dr. Yuan highly deserving of recognition from PASEDB. He easily meets the bar of showing exceptional experimental skill, forging new ground that has paved the way for other plant evodevo researchers. He and his collaborators have transformed Mimulus from a well known taxon for the study of evolutionary ecology, into a workhorse of functional genomics. With these tools, I expect he will continue to make exciting discoveries about the genetic and developmental mechanisms responsible for the tremendous morphological diversity of angiosperms. Thank you for considering this nomination.
* Eduardo Zattara
University of Connecticut
Nominated by Rodrigo Nunes da Fonseca & Natalia Pabón-Mora
Nomination Rationale: No rationale provided to date
Service Award
* Scott Gilbert
Swarthmore College
Nominated by Jeff Marcus
Nomination Rationale: I nominated Scott Gilbert for the PASEDB Service Award because of his decades-long contributions to evolutionary developmental biology. In particular, through his Developmental Biology textbook and online materials (where he balances model system approaches with non-tradtional model systems), through his pioneering book on eco-evo-devo, through his exemplary teaching at Swarthmore College, and through his public outreach, Gilbert has helped to train many thousands of students across the globe in many of the fundamental principles of evolution and development. Thus I believe that he is a worthy recipient of the first PASEDB Service Award.
* Eric Haag
University of Maryland, College Park
Nominated by Leslie Pick
Nomination Rationale: No rationale provided to date
* Nipam Patel
Marine Biological Laboratory
Nominated by Ehab Abouheif & Gregory K. Davis
Nomination Rationale: As a pioneer of evodevo studies in multiple non-model arthropod species, Nipam H. Patel has made fundamental discoveries in both the evolution of developmental systems and the developmental basis of the evolution of morphology. Renowned early in his career for his technical prowess enlisting cross-reactive antibodies for comparative molecular embryology, Nipam showed us how the gene expression underlying segmentation has both remained conserved and evolved, often in cases where the embryology has changed dramatically. As many of the genes involved in the process of segmentation are also involved in neurogenesis, Nipam has made important contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the arthropod central nervous system. With a combination of descriptive work and functional studies in the amphipod Parhyale hawaiensis, Nipam has also provided us with deep insights into the role Hox genes play in the evolution of morphology. Nipam’s group continues to work on Hox genes, while also investigating germ line regeneration in Parhyale and structural color in butterflies.
* Mary Jane West-Eberhard
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
Nominated by Dave Angelini
Nomination Rationale: I would like to nominate Mary Jane West-Eberhard for consideration to the EvoDevoPanAm Pioneer Award. The award would recognize her research and theoretical contributions on the roles of developmental plasticity in evolution and her involvement in science in Latin America. West-Eberhard was born and educated in Michigan. She worked with the evolutionary zoologist Richard Alexander, receiving her PhD from the University of Michigan in 1967. She spent three years at Harvard as a postdoc with the entomologist Howard Evans, where she began studying the evolution of sociality in tropical wasps. In 1969, West-Eberhard took a research position at Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia, and in 1986 moved to a full-time position at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama where she worked until retirement in 2013. West-Eberhard's research drew attention to the importance of plasticity, including polyphenism and polymorphism, as well as behavioral plasticity, in evolution. She worked extensively with tropical paper wasps (*Polistes*), which also provided insights on social competition and sexual selection. She has authored more than 30 journal articles, most in top-tier journals, with thousands of citations. *Developmental Plasticity and Evolution*, published in 2003, was highly influential during the renaissance of evo-devo. The book encapsulated the idea that environmentally influenced phenotypic plasticity could be an important factor for evolutionary trajectories.
In addition to her research, West-Eberhard has been involved in numerous organizations promoting science and science education in Latin America including the Organization for Tropical Studies, the Monteverde Conservation League, the (Costa Rican) National Center for High Technology, the Costa Rican Section on Science and Technology, the (US) National Center for Science Education, the (US) National Academy of Sciences Committee on Human Rights. She has also served on the editorial boards of biological journals based in the US, Colombia and Costa Rica. West-Eberhard's scientific contributions have been recognized by several other organizations. She has been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences (1988), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1996), the Costa Rican National Academy of Sciences (2002), Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (2005), and the Animal Behavior Society (2009). The American Society of Naturalists presented her with the Sewell Wright Award in 2003. *Developmental Plasticity and Evolution* won the the American Association of Publishers's Hawkins Award for best scholarly book of 2003. She was the distinguished Hamilton Lecturer for the International Society of Behavioral Ecology in 2004. She received the Quest Award for Lifetime Achievement from Animal Behavior Society in 2012, and the Hamilton Award from International Union for the Study of Social Insects in 2014. West-Eberhard has been an important contributor to the intellectual basis of evo-devo and a person whose career is intrinsically connected to Latin America. Therefore, I believe she would be a worthy honoree for our society, especially this year, as we meet in Miami, a city which itself bridges the Americas.
Early Career Award
* Kim Cooper
University of California San Diego
Nominated by Dave Angelini
Nomination Rationale: No rationale provided to date
* Emma Farley
University of California San Diego Medical School
Nominated by Deirdre Lyons
Nomination Rationale: Emma's work has elegantly demonstrated that sub-optimization of enhancers is necessary for controlling precision in tissue-specific gene expression. Emma pioneered the techniques involved in generating these unbiased screens for finding functional enhancers, taking advantage of the compact genome and ability to electroporate embryos in the ascidian, Ciona. Her work has immediate and profound implications for other organisms, including humans. While most of the enhancer evolution field has been focusing on finding "conserved" binding sites for regulatory factors, Emma's approach has been to take a more difficult, but innovative, approach to identifying the "grammar" of enhancers. By developing the tools to study this language, she has defined a major path forward for the field.
* Patricia Schneider
Universidade de Para
Nominated by Rodrigo Nunes da Fonseca & Natalia Pabón-Mora
Nomination Rationale: No rationale provided to date
* Mansi Srivastava
Harvard University
Nominated independently by both Elena Kramer and Deirdre Lyons
Nomination Rationale (Kramer): I am writing to enthusiastically nominate Dr. Mansi Srivastava for the PASEDB Early Career Award. Dr. Srivastava is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, with a joint appointment as a curator in the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Dr. Srivastava’s research is at the forefront of contemporary evolutionary developmental biology and comparative genomics, particularly in the largely unexplored invertebrate phyla that populate the base of the evolutionary tree of multicellular animals. Her discoveries have yielded novel and important insights into the evolution of multicellular life and the evolutionary relationships among the major clades of animals. As a graduate student, she was the lead author of two papers, both published in Nature, which reported the first genomes of a sponge and a placozoan. These taxa are representative of the earliest evolved multicellular animals—which do not even have tissue-level organization—so these genomes are a remarkable contribution to our knowledge of the genomic diversity of animals. As a postdoctoral fellow, Mansi shifted to, and is currently focusing on, acoel worms. This is an extremely interesting animal group that sits at the base of the Bilateria. The acoels diverged prior to the evolution of a discrete excretory system and also before the divergence of protostomes (e.g., arthropods, annelids, mollusks) and deuterostomes (e.g., echinoderms, vertebrates). This makes acoels a crucial group for deciphering the characteristics of early animals as well as what is shared among assemblages of present day organisms, including humans. Another powerful aspect of this lineage is their capacity to undergo whole-body regeneration, a phenomenon that has fascinating implications for medical science.
Dr. Srivastava’s current research is aimed at understanding the evolutionary developmental biology of regeneration in acoels, specifically in the three-banded panther worm Hofstenia miamia, a system whose development she spear-headed while a postdoc. Her initial discoveries include the elucidation of the roles of Wnt and Bmp-Admp signaling in establishing the anterior-posterior and dorsal-ventral axes, respectively. This research is relevant both to the biology of regeneration in general and to our overall understanding of the diversity of life. On-going work in the lab combines genome sequencing with ATAC-seq, Drop-seq and RNA-seq to make rapid advances towards an understanding of the genome-wide regulatory landscape of whole-body regeneration. The potential of this approach to transform our understanding of acoel development and regeneration has been recognized with both a NIH NIGMS MIRA award and a NSF CAREER award, as well as a Smith Family Foundation Award for Excellence in Biomedical Research and a Searle Scholar Award. Thus, I feel that Dr. Srivastava fulfills multiple aspects of your criteria for an Early Career Award, including the application of innovative techniques to a classic question (regeneration) in the context of significant new taxonomic coverage and exceptional experimental skill. Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions
Nomination Rationale (Lyons): Mansi has been at the forefront of genomics studies of basally-branching metazoans since her graduate work. Her achievements in this area including leading the genome papers for sponge, tricoplax, acoel, and co-leading the Nematostella genome. In her post doc, she developed the acoel worm Hofstenia as a model for whole body regeneration, and showed that acoels are an out-group to all other Bilaterians. Hofstenia develop via embryos with defined cell lineages, making it possible to study the developmental origin of neoblasts, now a major focus on her lab. Another important contribution her lab is making is studying comparative regeneration from a whole-genome perspective, which will set the pace for the field.
* Yaowu Yuan
University of Connecticut
Nominated by Stacey Smith
Nomination Rationale: I’m writing to nominate Dr. Yaowu Yuan for the Pan-AM EvoDevo Early Career Award. I would like to state from the outset that I have no professional relationship with Dr. Yuan (i.e., as an advisor, collaborator, etc.). However, we study similar questions, and thus I know his work very well. I have known Dr. Yuan since about 2009, shortly after he finished his graduate work. He did his Phd with Dr. Richard Olmstead at the University of Washington in Seattle in the area of molecular evolution and phylogenetics. After completing his PhD, he began working as postdoc with Dr. Sue Wessler at the University of Georgia, where he researched transposase genes, leading to a first-authored publication in PNAS. He then returned to UW for a second postdoc with Dr. Toby Bradshaw. It was that point that Dr. Yuan started the research program for which he is now best known, one which uses the natural diversity in flower size, shape, and color in monkeyflowers to determine the genetic basis for variation. While many other researchers have developed new genetic tools in ‘nonmodel’ organisms, Dr. Yuan’s work stands out for his sheer tenacity in tackling even the most
complex traits, like floral patterning and shape. Dr. Yuan has been determined, since the time I first met him, to bring the research potential of model systems into wild species in order to address fundamental questions in evodevo. As a postdoc, he not only conducted standard association studies to identify the genetic basis for floral differences across Mimulus, but he also developed a collection of hundreds of chemically-induced mutants in multiple species. These mutants display many novel phenotypes but also mirror natural variants. His combination of forward and reverse genetic approaches has allowed him to dissect the genetic architecture of floral traits (e.g. Yuan et al. 2013) and discover previously unknown player in flower development (e.g., an actin gene controlling flower width, Ding et al. 2017). The ability to conduct the sorts of molecular genetic experiments in Mimulus that are generally restricted to model plants like Arabidopsis has surely taken a Herculean effort on the part of Dr. Yuan’s and his lab but has been central to his major advances.
In this context, I would like to highlight the impact of his findings in Mimulus for the field of plant evo-devo broadly. Ours is a field that has been often driven by findings in model systems which provide candidate genes for study in non-model systems. Although this approach has been effective for some deeply shared pathways (like the anthocyanin pigment biosynthesis), it has limited our research in terms of the traits amenable for study. By pushing the boundaries of functional research outside of classic genetic model organisms and commonly studied traits, Dr. Yuan has made discoveries the importance of which is hard to overstate. A stand-out in my mind is his work of the regulators of carotenoid biosynthesis. Carotenoids act as accessory pigments for photosynthesis and provide the red, yellow, and orange coloration of fruits and flowers (especially so-called nectar guides). Still, essentially nothing was known about the genes which regulate carotenoid production until the truly ground-breaking studies of Dr. Yuan and his lab (Sagawa et al. 2016; Stanley et al. 2017). By identifying these genes and their molecular function, these papers have opened a new door for comparative research in which we can begin to ask if the same regulators are involved in other taxa and thus may have been recruited for carotenoid regulation early in plant evolution. I believe that his newer work on the genetic basis for petal fusion (required for developing a tubular flower) will be similarly fundamental. Across these studies, a common theme in his research is linking molecular mechanisms and developmental processes to major questions in evolutionary biology. I’ve been particularly impressed with his contributions to our understanding of pattern formation (Yuan et al. 2016), overdominance (one of the mechanisms thought to underlie hybrid vigor) (LaFountain et al. 2017) and DNA transposition (Yuan and Wessler 2011). I believe that this ability to confront classic problems with innovative yet careful experimentation in natural systems will lead his work to receive increasing attention beyond the plant world. Indeed, this research program is already well represented in the literature, with 23 papers in leading journals (e.g., Molecular Biology and Evolution, Plant Cell, Genetics). He has also garnered significant extramural support, including a two sole PI awards from NSF-IOS and a recent collaborative NSF-EDGE grant, which will ensure the continued development of Mimulus as a model clade for evo-devo.
Given his major contributions to plant evo-devo as an early career researcher, I consider Dr. Yuan highly deserving of recognition from PASEDB. He easily meets the bar of showing exceptional experimental skill, forging new ground that has paved the way for other plant evodevo researchers. He and his collaborators have transformed Mimulus from a well known taxon for the study of evolutionary ecology, into a workhorse of functional genomics. With these tools, I expect he will continue to make exciting discoveries about the genetic and developmental mechanisms responsible for the tremendous morphological diversity of angiosperms. Thank you for considering this nomination.
* Eduardo Zattara
University of Connecticut
Nominated by Rodrigo Nunes da Fonseca & Natalia Pabón-Mora
Nomination Rationale: No rationale provided to date
Service Award
* Scott Gilbert
Swarthmore College
Nominated by Jeff Marcus
Nomination Rationale: I nominated Scott Gilbert for the PASEDB Service Award because of his decades-long contributions to evolutionary developmental biology. In particular, through his Developmental Biology textbook and online materials (where he balances model system approaches with non-tradtional model systems), through his pioneering book on eco-evo-devo, through his exemplary teaching at Swarthmore College, and through his public outreach, Gilbert has helped to train many thousands of students across the globe in many of the fundamental principles of evolution and development. Thus I believe that he is a worthy recipient of the first PASEDB Service Award.