The Theodosius Dobzhansky Prize                                          

The Theodosius Dobzhansky Prize is awarded annually by the Society for the Study of Evolution to recognize the accomplishments and future promise of an outstanding young evolutionary biologist.   The prize was established in memory of Professor Dobzhansky by his friends and colleagues, and reflects his lifelong commitment to fostering the research careers of young scientists.

The winner of the 2006 Dobzhansky Award is Dr. Franziska Michor of Harvard University.   Dr. Michor began her graduate work at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton and received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 2005; her undergraduate work was at Trieste and Vienna. She has an astounding--quite embarrasing to the rest of us--record, with 36 publications since 2002, including first-authored papers in Nature and in many other prestigious journals.

Dr. Franziska Michor 2007 Prize Winner

She has already presented dozens of invited talks. Franziska's Ph.D. was on the evolutionary dynamics of cancer, bridging experimental and theoretical biology as well as medical and evolutionary research.   Her research takes a sophisticated mathematical approach to understanding the evolutionary dynamics of cancer cells and the genetics of tumor supression. Michor's work has both major theoretical and practical implications. The awards committee was particularly impressed with Michor's application of evolutionary reasoning and approaches to a somewhat unconventional subject, the biology of cancer. Her bold and innovative thinking adds breadth, depth, integration, and excitement to evolutionary biology as well as to fundamental medical research.

Past Dobzhansky Prize winners:

1981 Douglas R. Cavener
1982 Elizabeth Anne Zimmer
1983 Anthony J. Zera
1984 Robb F. Leary
1985 Joshua J. Schwartz
1986
1987 Ary A. Hoffman
1988 Steven A. Frank
1989 Bernard J. Crespi
1990 Erik Greene
1991 Jonathan Losos
1992 Barry Sinervo
1993 H. Allen Orr
1994 David Haig
1995 David Begun
1996 Rufus A. Johnstone
1997 Massimo Pigliucci
1998 Christian Peter Klingenberg
1999 Jason B. Wolf
2000 Thomas Lenormand
2001 Alexander Badyaev
2002 Howard Rundle
2003 Daven Presgraves
2004 Aneil Agrawal
2005 Daniel Bolnick
2006 Russel Bonduriansky

The R.A. Fisher Prize                                                                                 

Two years ago, the SSE initiated The R.A. Fisher Prize to recognize the most significant paper published in Evolution in the previous year, based on a recent PhD dissertation. 

In doing this, we pay tribute to both one of the most distinguished evolutionists of the 20 th century and to the most promising young evolutionary biologists.  

Sir Ronald Fisher deserves this recognition for developing, with JBS Haldane and Sewell Wright, theoretical population genetics and establishing its central position within evolutionary biology.   Fisher's interests ranged widely, but placed particular emphasis on the dynamics of mutation and selection and how these contributed to adaptation.

Dr. Guillaume Martin has been selected as this year's Fisher Prize winner for extending Fisher's tradition in evolutionary population genetics.   The Prize recognizes his paper:

Martin, G. and T. Lenormand. 2007. A general multivariate extension of Fisher's geometrical model and the distribution of mutation fitness effects across species. Evolution 60: 893-907.

Dr. Guillaume Martin 2007 Prize Winner

This is one of two papers that Martin published with his PhD advisor (and former Dobzhansky Prize winner) Thomas Lenormand in Evolution in 2006.   The paper is exceptional in several respects.   It extends Fisher's original 'geometric' model (later extended by Allen Orr, another Dobzhansky Prize winner) which seeks to understand the probability that a new mutation will either decrease or increase fitness as a function of how large an effect it has and how close a population is to an adaptive peak.   In general, we expect beneficial mutations to be less frequent in complex organisms - reflecting a 'cost to complexity.'   However, Martin and Lenormand show that interactions among traits improve the situation, helping to account for the fact that empirical distributions of mutational effects tend to be more similar than might be expected, from E. coli to fruitflies.   This is important, not only because it improves the chances that animals like us won't always be mutating out of existence, but also because the distribution of mutational effects has an important role in many areas of evolutionary biology.

Past Fisher Prize winners:

2006 Maurine Neiman