OEB News

Brian Langerhans, Liang Liu, Charlie Willis and Santiago Ramirez receive recognition at Evolution 2008 meetings

OEB performed spectacularly at the Evolution 2008 meetings held in Minneapolis June 20-24. In addition to excellent talks by several labs (Hoekstra, Donohue, Losos, Edwards, Kramer), four OEB students/postdocs were singled out for prestigious awards:

  • Brian Langerhans (Losos lab Grad student)
    Brian Langerhans was awarded the R.A. Fisher Prize by the Society for the Study of Evolution to recognize the most significant paper published in Evolution in the previous year based on a recent PhD dissertation.
    (Paper title: Langerhans, R.B., Gifford, M.E. and Joseph, E.O. Ecological speciation in Gambusia fishes. Evolution 61(9):2056-2074)
  • Liang Liu (Postdoc in the Edwards lab)
    Liang Liu received the Systematic Biologists publisher's award for best dissertation paper published in the journal Systematic Biology in 2007.
    (Paper title: "Species Trees from Gene Trees: reconstructing Bayesian posterior distributions of a species phylogeny using estimated gene tree distributions. Systematic Biology, 56:504-514, 2007")
  • Charlie Willis (Grad student in the Donohue/Davis labs)
    Charlie contended for three prizes and received honorable mention for the Society for the Study of Evolution's W. D. Hamilton Award for an outstanding student oral presentation at the meetings. He was also finalist in the Ernst Mayr competition for best student oral presentation, an award that OEB's Catherine Linnen and Corrie Moreau received last year. Charlie Willis also received a Graduate Student Travel Award from the American Society of Naturalists.
  • Santiago Ramirez (Grad student in the Pierce lab)
    Santiago Ramirez was a finalist in the Ernst Mayr competition for best student oral presentation.

In addition, several OEB undergrads, including Elaine Vo and Rob Furrow, gave posters at the poster session. The OEB department made a great showing at this year's Evolution meetings (which will be in Moscow Idaho next year, for Darwin's 200th birthday), and congratulations are extended to all.

[July 15, 2008]