Stefany Moreno Gámez
We are happy to announce that former MARM and GELIFES PhD student Stefany Moreno Gámez will be awarded the John Maynard Smith Prize 2021 of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) for her PhD thesis “On the origin and function of phenotypic variation in bacteria”. Stefany defended her thesis, supervised by professors G.S. van Doorn and F.J. Weissing, last December and was awarded the highest distinction, cum laude.

The Award Committee justifies the decision as follows:

The committee was particularly impressed by the breadth of your interests, combined with the thoroughness of the approaches you used to tackle diverse, yet always fascinating, issues. Also, the fact that you combine mathematical modelling to generate predictions with well thought-through and often methodologically-challenging experiments to test these predictions was highly appreciated.

The JMS Prize comes with an invitation to give the JMS Prize 2021 lecture at the next ESEB congress in August 2022 in Prague, Czech Republic. In addition, the JMS prize comes with a monetary prize of 2500 €, the possibility of a six-months Junior Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin, and the invitation to write a review for the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.