The Lifetime Achievement Award was created to recognize individuals who have made substantial contributions to the study of evolution, who have demonstrated outstanding mentorship of trainees, and/or who have provided noteworthy service to the evolution community.
2024 Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient: Ruth Shaw
SSE Council is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award, Dr. Ruth Shaw.
Dr. Shaw was selected for her fundamental empirical and conceptual contributions to evolutionary biology and her commitment to SSE. Dr. Shaw has developed foundational methods for statistical inferences about fitness in natural populations. She has implemented these methods in the field to assess fitness in natural populations, such as in The Echinacea Project, studying the long-lived Echinacea angustifolia to evaluate the consequences of habitat fragmentation in tallgrass prairie. Dr. Shaw has also advanced understanding of the fitness effects of de novo mutations, capacity for ongoing evolutionary adaptation, and geographic scale of adaptation in wild populations. Dr. Shaw has served in numerous roles in SSE since 1991, most recently as President in 2020.
Dr. Shaw will present the Lifetime Achievement Award talk at the virtual portion of the 2024 Evolution meeting on Friday, June 28 at 7:45 am Eastern (GMT-4). Visit the Evolution meeting website for the full program and to register.
Dr. Sarah "Sally" Otto was selected for her countless important contributions to evolutionary biology as a researcher, mentor, educator, and activist. As an outstanding researcher, Dr. Otto’s empirical and theoretical work on the evolution of ploidy, sex, and recombination has moved the field forward. As a mentor and educator, she has provided rigorous and accessible training to the next generation of biologists. As a member of the scientific community and citizen of the world, she has served in leadership roles for several scientific societies (the American Society of Naturalists (ASN), the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, the American Genetic Association, and SSE), co-founded the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution, and directs the Liber Ero Fellowship Program. At every level, Dr. Otto has worked towards bettering the environment—scientifically and globally, individually and collaboratively. Her achievements have been recognized with a number of awards (including the Darwin-Wallace Medal from the Linnean Society, the Sewall Wright Award from ASN, the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant", National Academy of Sciences membership, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada), and we are delighted to honor her with the Lifetime Achievement Award for 2023. Watch Dr. Otto's award talk at Evolution 2023.
Dr. Marcus Feldman is the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Biology, founder and director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, and co-director of the Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics at Stanford University. His innovative research has contributed to our understanding of the evolution of recombination and sex, human population genetics, niche construction, and evolutionary theory. With Dr. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Dr. Feldman also developed a new field termed cultural evolution, which studies how genetic and cultural variation can interact and affect one another. Over the course of his career, he has mentored numerous trainees, from high school students to postdocs, and was awarded the Allan V. Cox Medal for Fostering Undergraduate Research at Stanford and the Stanford Biosciences Excellence in Mentoring and Service Award. In 1970, he co-founded the journal Theoretical Population Biology. He was also the Editor of The American Naturalist from 1984 to 1990. Dr. Feldman was named the Dan David Laureate in Evolution in 2011, and received the Motoo Kimura Prize in Human Evolution in 2016.
Dr. Richard E. Lenski is the John Hannah Distinguished Professor of Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University (MSU). For more than 30 years, he has directed one of the most significant experiments in evolutionary biology, the E. coli Long Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE). He is one of the founding members of the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action at MSU, and today serves on its executive committee. Dr. Lenski has previously received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship, and has been elected to the American Academy of Microbiology, the European Molecular Biology Organization, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. In addition to his outstanding research contributions, he is known for being an exceptional mentor and role model for up and coming evolutionary biologists. He also served the community as President of SSE in 2013.
Dr. Deborah Charlesworth has been a key champion for the field of evolutionary biology. Her wide-ranging work has led to crucial insights into some of the most important outstanding evolutionary questions. She has also shown a tireless commitment to mentorship and encouragement of young scientists in evolutionary biology as an exemplary mentor and role model. Furthermore, she has served the evolution community as president of both the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution and the European Society for Evolutionary Biology.
