American Society of Naturalists

The ASN Early Career Investigator Award was established in 1984 to recognize outstanding and promising work by investigators who received their doctorates in the three years preceding the application deadline or who are in their final year of graduate school. (Time since PhD degree can be extended by 1 year for each child born or adopted during this period if the applicant has been a primary care giver. Other forms of exceptional caregiving responsibility [e.g., partner, spouse, aged parent, etc]. or extenuating circumstances will be considered on a case-by-case basis.)

We are pleased to announce that this year’s recipients of the ASN Early Career Investigator Awards are Brooke Bodensteiner, Tomas Kay, Patrick McKenzie, Takahiro Sakamoto, and Erin Westeen!

• Erin P. Westeen (Arizona State University, Texas A&M, and UNAM) is an evolutionary ecologist who studies how phenotypic diversity arises and mediates species interactions in vertebrates with a focus on squamate reptiles.
• Takahiro Sakamoto (Kyushu University) is a theoretical population geneticist who mainly studies the dynamics of local adaptation under complex spatial structure and polygenic architectures.
• Patrick F. McKenzie (Harvard University) is a botanist who integrates systematics, speciation, and natural history approaches to study evolution in North American flowering plants.
• Tomas Kay (Rockefeller University) combines genotypes of clonal ants into chimeric colonies to study social evolutionary dynamics.
• Brooke L. Bodensteiner (University of Alabama) is an evolutionary ecologist who studies how reptiles interact with their thermal environments and how those interactions shape evolutionary patterns of phenotypic diversity.

We are very much looking forward to the participation of Bodensteiner, Kay, and McKenzie in the ASN Early Career Investigator symposium at the upcoming annual meeting in Cleveland, Ohio (June 23 from 2:30 to 5:30 PM), and of Sakamoto and Westeen next year in Puerto Rico!

We wish to thank the Early Career Awards Committee members for their hard work evaluating the many competitive applications: Drs. Jean-Philippe Gibert (chair), Sarah Fitzpatrick, Chris Moore, and Jesse Weber.