Dr Mads Andersen

Carleton University in Canada

Mads Kuhlmann Andersen is a comparative physiologist interested in the mechanisms underlying variation in insect thermal tolerance. His research uses Drosophila model systems with documented variation in thermal tolerance to investigate the impact of temperature stress on local and systemic ion balance regulation and osmoregulatory function. He integrates electrophysiological, pharmacological, and molecular approaches into his research to uncover how specific physiological mechanisms shape thermal tolerance. Mads is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Biology at Carleton University in Canada

Evan McKenzie

University of British Columbia

I started my academics with a BSc at the University of Guelph, in southern Ontario, where I studied cell types of the hagfish slime gland in the laboratory of Professor Douglas Fudge. I then move on to the University of British Columbia to begin a masters program under the supervision of Professor Phil Matthews studying the buoyancy regulation mechanism of Chaoborus midge larvae. This project quickly branched into many interesting areas, leading me to transfer to a doctoral program with the same laboratory.

Charlotte Nelson

University of British Columbia

I study the unique  respiratory physiology of teleost fishes. My  PhD work in Colin Brauner's lab at The University of British Columbia focused on the  physiological, evolutionary and developmental constraints on plasma accessible  carbonic anhydrase distribution in teleost fishes with varied life histories. Plasma accessible  carbonic anhydrase plays an essential role in the unique system of enhanced oxygen unloading  in  teleost  fishes and as such represents an important part of a system likely present in half of all vertebrates. 

Dr. Erin Cullen

Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research

Erin received her Bachelor’s degree (First-Class Honours) from the University of York. During this time, she undertook a year in industry at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (London). At Kew she studied stomatal development in early land plants with light and electron microscopy, under the tutelage of Dr Paula Rudall, and it was during this time she developed a love of plant development. Erin then undertook her PhD at the University of Cambridge, where she was supervised by Professor Beverley Glover and studied nectar spur (tubular outgrowths of the petal) development through transcriptomic approaches. Erin joined Dr Angela Hay's group as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding research (Cologne) to study 'Explosive seed launch' in Cardamine hirsuta. She received a DFG Walter Benjamin fellowship to pursue this work.

Frederike Klimm

University of Freiburg Plant Biomechanics Group GrowBot @ FMF Cluster of Excellence livMatS @ FIT

Frederike Klimm is a researcher in the field of plant biomechanics, who is especially fascinated by plant movement and plant attachment systems on land and in water. She received her Bachelor's and Master's degree in Biology from the University of Freiburg, Germany. Her studies also included research stays at Heriot-Watt University, Scotland and at Friday Harbor Laboratories, University of Washington, US. Currently, she is a PhD student in the Plant Biomechanics Group at the Botanical Garden of University of Freiburg, where her research focuses on the movement and attachment of climbing passion flowers. She works within the framework of the "growing robots" project GrowBot, which aims for a new paradigm of movement in robotics, inspired by the movement and anchoring capacities of climbing plants, and the Cluster of Excellence livMatS ("Living, Adaptive and Energy-autonomous Materials Systems").

Dr. Alicja Kunkowska

School of Advanced Studies Sant'Anna

I studied Biotechnology and Biotechnology of Peptides and Proteins at the University of Wroclaw, Poland (2009-2014). During my studies I spent 8 months as an intern at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam Golm, Germany. After my graduation I started my PhD dissertation in the group of prof Joost van Dongen at RWTH Aachen University (Germany). I was investigating the role of reactive oxygen species during leaf growth and obtained my PhD degree in 2019. Since then, I’ve joined the lab of prof Pierdomenico Perata in Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies (Pisa, Italy) as a postdoctoral researcher to work on hypoxia stress signaling. 

2022 YSAS Winner - Cell Section: Kristian Kiradjiev

I have obtained my undergraduate and Master's degrees in mathematics from the University of Oxford and graduated in 2016. Then I started my DPhil in the Industrially Focused Mathematical Modelling Centre for Doctoral Training again at Oxford. I completed my DPhil studies in 2020, following which I did an EPSRC Doctoral Prize postdoctoral fellowship.

I am passionate about applied mathematics and using mathematical models in environmental, industrial, biological, and geological processes. My DPhil research involved fluid mechanics, filtration, flow through porous media, modelling chemical reactions, and moving-boundary problems, associated with modelling filters for waste and toxic gas, produced from factories and power plants. I have also worked on problems involving heat transfer and mathematical biology. Currently, I am modelling transport of gibberellic acid in plants, which is a growth hormone that has a major impact on how plants evolve with potential applications in crops industry. I use techniques from various mathematical subjects including: analysis of ordinary and partial differential equations, asymptotic analysis and the theory of mathematical homogenisation, complex analysis and applications, numerical methods for solving differential equations, and others. In addition, I am also interested in various problems in geometry.

I am working on modelling transport of the growth hormone gibberellic acid in plants, which has potential applications in the crops industry.

YSAS 2022

1. Could you provide us with a short summary of your presentation's contents and how it links to your research?

Thank you! I am a postdoc at the University of Nottingham and work with Prof. Leah Band on creating mathematical models for hormone transport in plants. The presentation I gave at the conference was about a model that can be used to predict how a particular growth hormone (GA) is transported within the root of an Arabidopsis plant, and how its levels are affected by external conditions, such as pH of the environment. The model is validated against experimental data that have been collected from our collaborators at the Tel Aviv University and the University of Copenhagen, and it gives an excellent agreement with experimental results. Our findings are being used to gain more insight into the biological mechanisms governing hormone transport without having to perform complex and time-consuming experiments, and our project has direct applications in the crops industry.

2.     How do you feel about winning the award?

I am thrilled and incredibly thankful to the SEB committee for awarding me this prize, because this means my work has been recognized on a professional level by experts in the field. I think this and the opportunity to discuss my work with like-minded academics is the most important aspect of the award.

3.      Are there any other related research areas that you would like to explore in the future?

My DPhil background is in fluid dynamics and filtration, and I have recently moved to mathematical biology. I find the field full of interesting mathematics and well-defined applications, and, in the future, I would like to explore areas in human biology, microbiology, and immunology, where mathematical models can be successfully applied.

4.      What has been your experience with the SEB so far?

I became a member of the SEB last year when I started my project and have already attended two conferences. SEB provides a great medium for disseminating research, career advice, and networking with other academics. I would like to say that this year's conference in Montpellier was a great experience, not only because of the venue, but also because of the scope of research that was presented and the international scientists I communicated with.

5.      Do you have any advice for other young scientists hoping to apply for this award next year?

Yes, my simple advice is to invest an extra day or two in preparing an application, thinking about the novelty and biological importance of their results, and if selected focusing on effectively delivering these messages through the presentation.

2022 YSAS Winner - Animal Section: Camille Le Roy

Camille Le Roy is currently a postdoc researcher at the University of Wageningen (the Netherlands). He earned his bachelor and master in biology at the University of Rennes (France) in 2017, and his PhD in Evolutionary Biology at the Natural History Museum of Paris in 2020. In his thesis work he studied the diversification of flight behaviours in Neotropical butterflies from the genus Morpho. To do so, Camille placed himself at the cornerstone of various disciplines including evolutionary and behavioural ecology, morphometrics and aerodynamics. His PhD involved extensive field work in the Peruvian rainforest, where he successfully builds a high-speed videography setup to film and quantify the flight of various Morpho butterfly species, so far only known through naturalistic observations. Camille’s PhD work has been published in major scientific journals such as Science and Nature Communications, attesting for the importance of its findings. He is now pursuing research on the diversification of flying insects, focusing on the order Diptera for his postdoc project in Wageningen University.

YSAS 2022

1. Could you provide us with a short summary of your presentation's contents and how it links to your research?

The content of my presentation was about the main study I perform during my PhD. In short, we studied the adaptive codivergence in wing shape, flight behavior, and aerodynamic efficiency among Morpho butterflies living in different forest strata by combining high-speed videography in the field with morphometric analyses and aerodynamic modeling. By comparing canopy and understory species, we show that adaptation to an open canopy environment resulted in increased gliding flight efficiency.

At the SEB in Montpellier, I went over the full story, introducing the selective pressures acting on insect flight that ultimately influence wing shape evolution. A remarkable example of wing shape diversity being butterflies! Then moving on the case-study of Morpho butterflies in which we observe different wing shapes between species living in the canopy vs. understory. I presented the field work I did to quantify the flight of Morpho species, the results obtained showing contrasted flight performances. I also presented the collaboration with aerodynamic engineers with whom we performed Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations on wings from Morpho from canopy vs. understory, and the results of the simulations showing contrasted aerodynamics properties between microhabitats. Finally, I concluded on the advantage of combining different disciplines/techniques (ecological field research, 3D high-speed videography analyses on freely flying butterflies, comparative phylogenetic morphometrics and computational aerodynamic modelling) to demonstrate how natural selection shapes complex phenotype.

2.     How do you feel about winning the award?

I am extremely glad to win the Young Scientist Award. This make a beautiful ending to the amazing adventure that my PhD was. I genuinely loved doing my PhD, both on the scientific and the human point of view. I think interest (or even passion) in the questions we investigate makes us work significantly better. Motivation allows going through difficult moments when things don’t work as we would like to. It also helps finding solutions to circumvent problems (be it on the field or during data analysis). I am very happy to see all these past years of work praised by the scientific community.

3.      Are there any other related research areas that you would like to explore in the future?

I am primarily interested in the evolutionary processes generating phenotypic diversity, with a particular focus on “movement-phenotypes” I would say. After focusing on butterfly flight, I would like to study the diversification of other flying animals. This could be other insects, but also why not birds or bats. I would also be excited to study the diversification of swimming animals! Finally, studying the combined evolution of movements and colors is something I find very appealing.

4.      What has been your experience with the SEB so far?

Before the 2022 edition in Montpellier, I only attended to the SEB conference in its online version in 2021. At that time I had a first glimpse at the impressive diversity of researchers and topics covered by the conference. Online conference is not really my thing, so I was quite eager to go in person and to meet the SEB community. The conference in Montpellier went super well, I had a really nice time navigating through many interesting talks and meeting new people!

5.      Do you have any advice for other young scientists hoping to apply for this award next year?

My advice is for sure to go for it! If you are enthusiast about your work, people will feel it in your written application as well as in your oral presentation. I think it’s very important to convey not only science, but excitement and passion about what we do.

 

2022 YSAS Winner - Plant Section: Trisha McAllister

YSAS 2022

Across the globe, plants have adapted a multitude of innovative physical traits to enable their survival indifferent habitats and in the face of environmental threats. One such trait is the cuticle, a lipid-rich hydrophobic barrier that seals the epidermis of all above-ground organs to protect against these threats. While the cuticle has been well researched in the model species Arabidopsis thaliana, less effort has been made to understand cuticle development in economically significant species such as the cereal crop barley – and this was the research topic with which Trisha McAllister, a PhD student at the University of Dundee, wowed the YSAS panel of judges.

‘My research addresses this knowledge gap by combining molecular, genetic and biochemical approaches to characterise cuticle mutants in barley,’ explains Trisha. ‘Ultimately, we hope that our work will aid the development of more climate-resilient crops.’ Specifically, her YSAS talk focused on an example of her work in this area that had recently been published. ‘We described the identification and characterisation of a barley SHINE transcription factor that is essential for proper cuticle development,’ she says. ‘Loss of this transcription factor alters the expression levels of known cuticle metabolic genes and results in a striking loss of cuticular waxes.’ This, she explains, can have a disastrous impact on crop susceptibility to fungal infections and drought.

The 2022 SEB Annual Conference was Trisha’s first time attending an SEB event and the experience has certainly left a positive impression. ‘I’d heard great things about the annual conferences, but I didn’t anticipate how welcoming and supportive the community would be,’ she says. ‘I came to the meeting alone but everyone I met made me feel right at home and I feel really honoured that I was selected for the YSAS award, but even just being shortlisted was an amazing opportunity.’

Trisha makes sure to also share her appreciation for the support provided to early-career researchers by the SEB and especially for those competing in the YSAS. ‘The SEB held a workshop for speakers prior to the conference to brief us on how the presentations would run and this was a really nice touch that made me feel much more prepared,’ she explains. ‘It was also lovely to see so many early-career researchers presenting at this meeting. The organisers had clearly made an effort to get a broad diversity of career stages represented.’

For prospective YSAS applicants next year, Trisha has two key pieces of advice. ‘First, don’t let self-doubt deter you from trying. We are often our own worst critic, just give yourself a break and try to be confident in your abilities,’ she says. ‘Second, try not to overload your talk. It can be tempting to show off the vast amounts of work you’ve done, but I think the best thing you can do is tell a simple story and make it crystal clear.’

2019 YSAS Winner - Plant Section: Thomas Chaloner

Completing an extended essay assignment on utilizing host induced gene silencing (HIGS) to protect crop plants against pathogenic fungi confirmed my interest in plant pathology and food security.

I am now a PhD student at the University of Exeter. My research focuses on temperture ecology of plant pathogens, across multiple scales of biology. I am interested in temperature broadly as an axis of a species nice, how temperature and climate change influences pathogen movement and resultant host disease risk, as well as the cell biology and genomics of temperature responses.

My research involves meta-analyses of big datasets, mechanistic modelling, genomics and bioinformatics, experiemntal evolution, microscopy, as well as standard laboratory techniques. 

YSAS 2019

At present we lose 20-40% of all food crops to pests and diseases. Crop diseases are caused by a range of microbes, including fungi, oomycetes, and bacteria.  These microbes all have a 'favourite' temperature range at which they function best, causing them to prefer different geographical regions over others. Knowing how these microbes react to temperature shifts could thus be key to preparing for new plant disease invasions over the coming years. "Although scientists have studied pathogen temperature responses for hundreds of years, there are still large gaps in our understanding," Thomas said. "To be able to predict, and hence protect, ecosystems from invasion and infection we need to better understand the flexibility of pathogen responses to changing environmental conditions."

One of Thomas’ main aims was to test whether microbes are able to evolve their temperature tolerance as fast as they could to other factors, such as which host plants they can infect. Thomas  investigated this by collating information on the temperature at which  microbes  grow best, as well as the coldest and hottest temperatures at which they can grow. Together, the minimum, optimum, and maximum temperatures are called the cardinal temperature. Whilst most studies consider temperature responses of one or two microbes at a time, Thomas' research is unique because it gathered and analysed published cardinal temperatures from over 600 types of pathogens. "My aim is to gain a better understanding of the overall fundamental picture of how pathogens respond to temperature, and how this relates to other aspects of their biology   and evolution," he explained. What Thomas found   surprised him. According to his study, plant pathogens are worse at evolving a new cardinal temperature than they are at evolving to infect new types of plants. This result could help us to understand more about how these pathogens have distributed themselves in the real world over changing environments. "I also think this finding raises more questions than it answers," Thomas suggested. "For example, why may pathogens, or organisms in general, find it easier to change some aspects of their biology compared with others?". Thomas believes that this research could equip conservation and agricultural organisations to better control plant diseases as global temperatures change. In particular, his PhD is focusing on temperature responses in the fungus Zymoseptoria tritici, which is responsible for the most common European wheat disease, Septoria leaf blotch.

Thomas was excited to be the winner of the YSAS award. "I'm very grateful to SEB for shortlisting me for the YSAS and giving me the opportunity to present to such a diverse audience," he enthused. "I'm very honoured to receive the Young Scientist Award, and all I can say is thank you to everyone that allowed that to be possible." Thomas stressed that his work was carried out with the support of his group and contributes to a research initiative into the global distributions of plant pests and pathogens led by Dr Dan Bebber and Professor Sarah Gurr at the Department of Biosciences, University of Exeter. This research in turn could aid the global effort to control the spread of plant diseases, and reduce the damage caused by climate change to our crops.

: @@thomaschaloner

2019 YSAS Winner - Animal Section: Michael Sackville

I’m a postdoc with Dr. Andrew Gillis at the University of Cambridge and Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory. I recently completed my PhD with Dr. Colin Brauner at the University of British Columbia.

I use comparative physiology and evo-devo to explore the evolution of gas and ion homeostasis in animals, and to promote sustainable aquaculture and wild fish conservation. My goal is to better understand how we arrived at our present state of biodiversity and to help protect it for the future.

Check out my research page for project details and my google scholar profile for an updated publication list.

YSAS 2019

Fish gills are important for more than just breathing-they're actually the primary site of many functions that we ascribe to our kidneys, such as maintaining pH and ion balance of the blood," explains Mike. "We've been testing the idea that gills became the primary site of ion regulation in early vertebrates before they were ever used for breathing, and that this was their key role in helping animals get big and active." By investigating the gill and skin function in living analogues to the early worm-like vertebrates, Mike and his team were able to piece together the most likely evolutionary scenario that helped gills become a major player in the worm-to-fish transition. "It turns out that our idea was half-right," Mike explains. "Gills certainly did help early vertebrates get big and fishy by taking on a primary role in breathing, but it looks like gills already had a primary role in ion regulation well before this transition, possibly as far back as the last common ancestor of deuterostomes." Taking this line of inquiry forward, Mike would like to invest more time in researching the origins and evolution of homeostasis to determine more about the fundamental role of pre-vertebrate gills in ion regulation. "To date, most of my work has been on the effector side of homeostasis, but I'd also love to explore the sensory side of things,” he adds. "We get great exposure  to such diverse research topics and fields in our department and at conferences like SEB that there are always new questions you want to chase or different people you want to work with."

Mike's journey to attaining this award started whilst he was working for an environmental consulting firm in Vancouver, Canada, when he got the opportunity to study locally for a master's degree exploring the effects of aquaculture-related parasites on wild fish stocks. "l ended up being co-supervised by Tony Farrell and Colin Brauner in University of British Columbia's zoology department and immediately fell in love with research and the community," says Mike, who later landed his current PhD position with Colin. "I had no idea this kind of occupation existed, and it was just a perfect fit for me." On winning the award, Mike had this to say:  "There are so many  excel lent people deserving  of this award that apply each year, so I felt extremely lucky just to be included in the session. It's such a tremendous privilege to get to share our work with the entire Animal Section, and the award really is the icing on the cake." Even without the award, Mike thoroughly enjoyed his time at the SEB Annual Meeting. "This meeting is an incredible opportunity to get to know the international community and to ensure cross-pollination between the different groups,” he concludes.  "And I can't think of anywhere I'd rather do that than over tapas and cervezas in Seville."

2018 YSAS Winner - Animal Section: Tim Lamont

Tim is a marine biologist at Lancaster Environment Centre, with research interests in coral reef ecology and restoration. He aims to understand the processes at work on healthy reefs, in order to guide efforts to restore degraded ecosystems. Tim studied has carried out research on coral reefs across the Indo-Pacific region, and completed a PhD in reef bioacoustics at the University of Exeter in 2020. He started his current research fellowship at Lancaster in 2022, funded by the Royal Commission of 1851 and in collaboration with the Mars Coral Reef Restoration Programme.

YSAS 2018

The beautifully delicate coral reefs of the world play an essential role in marine ecosystems, but right now they’re dying. Not only can we see this happening at an unprecedented rate – we can hear it too. Tim presented a dynamic and emotional talk on his research into the rapidly changing bioacoustics of coral reef communities.Tim first got interested in coral reef ecology while working off the coast of Kenya during his time as an undergraduate. “I was struck by the beauty and the value of coral reefs, but also by their vulnerability, and was inspired to do more research into their conservation,” he explained. Building on this interest, Tim then completed a Master’s course with Steve Simpson’s team atthe University of Exeter and stayed on to pursue his current PhD in coral reef soundscapes. Tim and his team eavesdrop on reef communities in order to assess their health and interpret what this could mean for their future. During the first half of his talk, Tim outlined the sad state of Australia’s Northern Great Barrier Reef and played actual audio recordings of the reef soundscapes alongside recordings from just 4 years earlier – and the difference was startling. “Reefs get quieter and sound characteristically different when they are damaged by bleaching and tropical cyclones,” explained Tim. “It’s really heart-breaking to hear.” During his PhD, Tim and his team collected soundscapes from the Great Barrier Reef and conducted field experiments by replaying the sounds of healthy and degraded reefs in the ocean, finding that degraded reef sounds were much less attractive to juvenile fish than healthy reefs. Unfortunately, this degradation appears to signal the start of a devastating feed backloop where quieter reefs attract fewer fish, which in turn causes further degradation. On the brighter side, Tim spent the second half of his talk explaining how his work with reef bioacoustics can be used to monitor reef health and develop ways of using soundscapes in mitigating further degradation and encouraging reef rehabilitation. On winning the award, Tim commented: “It’s a real honour to win the Young Scientist Award, but also very humbling - research is a team game and we all work together.” Tim ended his talk by graciously thanking his fellow researchers at the Universities of Exeter and Bristol and reminding us that effective change in this field can only be made when researchers work together with conservation practitioners and policy makers, as well as in collaboration with each other. “We have a lot of fun working together, so it’s great to be able to celebrate our successes together as well,” Tim concluded.

2018 YSAS Winner - Plant Section: Radka Slovak

YSAS 2018

Roots are incredibly dynamic organs in a plant’s toolkit. Not only are they stable anchors in the soil and efficient water and nutrient-delivery systems, but the root tips also undergo complex cellular changes to allow root growth. Interestingly too, the growth rate of roots is not fixed in a species; some genetic strains have been found to be better than others at putting down roots and understanding more about how these plants can vary their growth is crucial for understanding how they survive and thrive, and has implications, especially for agriculture and conservation. Radka Slovak (University of Oxford, UK) introduced her investigations into the question of how such strains vary in their root growth rate: “We know some of the developmental regulators in plant growth, but it’s not clear which genes are involved in the natural variation of root growth”. Based at the time in the Gregor Mendel Institute in Austria, Radka first set out to identify particular genes that vary and shape the root growth of Arabidopsisthaliana strains. She continued: “I combined a genome wide association study with an innovative root phenotyping study, and found a key candidate gene linked with variation in root growth: Adenylate Kinase (AK)”.While knocking down the function of AK in mutant strains of A. thaliana, Radka found a surprising effect on the root. “Without AK, roots grew less and had fewer cells than the wild-type strains, however the cells present were elongated to compensate; something that we did not expect to see in roots,” she confirmed. Thus, Radka’s experiments indicated that AK contributes to production of new cells in the meristematic zone of the root. At the same time, her experiments hinted at more complex genetic control of the roots than previously suggested.With this in mind, how does the gene AK influence cell production to promote root growth? Radka responds: “Further experiments indicated that AK promotes the biogenesis of ribosomes, the intracellular machines crucial for protein production”. With a higher efficiency in manufacturing ribosomes, plant cells would be able to produce proteins faster, and undergo mitosis more rapidly, growing the root tissue. Excited about the implications of this work, Radka concluded: “Now that we know that ribosomal biogenesis is a factor in root growth, this opens the way for more detailed work into how this affects the variation in plant growth in general.” Radka delivered a winning presentation in the YSAS session, and thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to disseminate her research. “The YSAS gave me an excellent opportunity to present my PhD work to a really broad audience,” she concludes. “It was a great experience and I would recommend everyone to try it as well.”

2017 YSAS Winner - Plant Section: Charlotte Hurst

YSAS 2017

“S-acylation: What the FLS2 is going on?!” That’s the question Charlotte Hurst (University of Dundee, United Kingdom) aimed to answer. S-acylation, the addition of long chain fatty acids to cysteine residues, is the only known reversible lipid modification of proteins in plants. Over 1000 proteins in plants can be S-acylated and disrupting S-acylation causes grossly abnormal phenotypes in Arabidopsis. Charlotte’s work focusses on S-acylation of FLS2, a receptor-like kinase that activates plant defences in response to the bacterial flagellin protein. But investigating when and how FLS2 is S-acylated proved far from easy, and in the end Charlotte had to completely overhaul many traditional protocols that turned out to be unsuitable for S-acylated proteins. Her persistence paid off however, and she demonstrated that S-acylation of FLS2 is a dynamic process and speculated that S-acylation helps target activated FLS2 for degradation, thus preventing hyper-activation of defence responses. “I was absolutely delighted to have been selected for the SEB Young Scientist Award as I knew the standards would be very high” Charlotte said. “I was very nervous beforehand as it was probably the largest audience I have ever presented to, but everyone was really encouraging and I actually enjoyed it once the fear had died down.” Given the troubleshooting and difficulties she had to overcome, winning the award was a real encouragement for Charlotte’s ambitions to continue in research after completing her PhD. “Winning this award has reminded me how much I enjoy what I do and it’s really great to get recognition for all the hard work I’ve done” she said.

2017 YSAS Winner - Animal Section: Anna Stöckl

Anna did her PhD in the Vision Group at Lund University in Sweden, before moving to Aalto University in Finland for a one-year postdoctoral position. In the past four years, she developed her own research programme as a Research Associate at Würzburg University. It centres on understanding how the visual system of insects extracts spatial and temporal information from their natural environment – and how this information is used to guide behaviour. “Our key model are hawkmoths”, states the biologist. “They are extremely agile fliers with a unique ability: they hover in front of flowers to suckle nectar like hummingbirds. Their high-resolution compound eyes can extract fine details, while also providing nocturnal species with the high sensitivity required to see well even in starlight. Thus, these fascinating insects allow us to study fundamental principles of night vision, spatial vision, motion vision and locomotion control, and thereby contribute to the general understanding of how neural processing gives rise to visual percepts and actions based on them.”

YSAS 2017

Animals use their eyes to gather visualinformation about the world, but it’sthe brain that is crucial to interpretingthese signals. Dr Anna Stöckl (Aalto University, Finland), presented her fascinating PhD work on the visual processing mechanisms in hawkmoths. Hawkmoths have specialneural adaptations that allow them to see well in dim light. “These moths neurally pool visual information in space and time to improve their visual sensitivity beyond the capacities of their eyes, but it was previously unclear which neurons are responsible for this processing,” said Anna. During a talk filled with impressive images and videos, Anna explained how she identified the neurons responsible as lamina monopolarcells. “This not only answers a decades old question in insect visual processing, it can also allow us to study these mechanisms in more detail and compare them to strategies used in vertebrate visual systems and artificial visual systems,” said Anna. Of the Young Scientist Award Session, Anna commented: “It was fantastic to feel my work being acknowledged. It gave me a real boost to believe in what I am doing.” She especially enjoyed the chance to communicate her work with a range of researchers outside of her usual audience. “It is a great exercise in presenting your work for non-specialists and a wonderful opportunity to discuss with researchers you don’t often get to meet.” Finally, Anna offered some advice for future YSAS applications: “Don’t hesitate to apply as the process in itself is a very rewarding learning experience, regardless of the outcome of the competition!"

2016 YSAS Winner - Plant Section: Jordan Brown

YSAS 2016

Given that up to 95% of the water used to irrigate crops is lost in transpiration, understanding how stomata (tiny pores on the underside of plant leaves) are regulated could help to develop more crops that are water-use efficient. Jordan Brown (University of Sheffield) investigated how light and carbon dioxide interact to regulate stomatal density and aperture. She identified a key light receptor which integrates signals relating to carbon dioxide levels. “In the long term, I hope to understand how plants regulate core responses to a range of environmental cues,” said Jordan. “This will enable us to produce crop lines that grow optimally in our increasingly extreme world”. Despite the SEB Brighton meeting being the largest audience to which she had ever presented, Jordan overcame her nerves to win the Young Scientist’s Award and would recommend the experience. “The application was a great means to reflect on my work to make it as communicable as possible, and the audience’s questions have encouraged me to think about new areas of research,” she said.  “It was a fantastic experience for me and I would highly encourage those eligible to apply next year”.  

2016 YSAS Winner - Animal Section: Cosima Porteus

“Winning the Young Scientist Award was a huge accomplishment for me and I still feel proud of this achievement, because, like many trainees, I sometimes don’t have enough confidence in myself. It has helped me realize that I belong in academia and helped me achieve my life-long dream of getting a tenure track position. I am currently an assistant professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough and I have just been awarded the President’s medal for the animal section from the SEB, another very prestigious award."

Cosima Porteus received her BSc from the University of Guelph, Canada, majoring in Marine and Freshwater Biology. Early during her undergraduate degree, Cosima became involved in research on freshwater mussels, fish and salamanders and became fascinated by how aquatic animals cope with various environmental challenges. She stayed at the University of Guelph, where she earned her MSc in Integrative Biology under the supervision of Dr. Pat Wright, studying the parameters affecting the boundry layers and oxygen supply to developing fish. She then moved to the University of British Columbia, to start her PhD under the supervision of Dr Bill Milsom in the Department of Zoology. Her PhD thesis characterized time dependent changes that take place in the response to low oxygen in fish, highlighting the importance of peripheral oxygen chemoreceptors in establishing these time domains.   

As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Exeter under the supervision of Prof Rod Wilson, Cosima determined why fish exposed to ocean acidification lose their ability to respond appropriately to olfactory cues that are vital for their survival in the wild. The results of this research combined behaviour, electrophysiology and transcriptomics to show a novel mechanism for how ocean acidification affects the behaviour of fish through the olfactory system.  

She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where her lab is continuing to study the effects and physiological mechanisms of anthropogenic stressors on aquatic animals. Her group have recently shown that ocean acidification negatively affects olfaction in Dungeness crabs, an economically important crustacean, in a similar way as in fish. These findings have wide implications for issues ranging from global food security, marine conservation to recreational and commercially-important fisheries. 

YSAS 2016

Greenhouse gases are certainly nothing to be sniffed at. Increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are disrupting ecosystems around the world and the oceans are no exception. “The oceans do us a big favour by absorbing 20 per cent of the carbon dioxide humans are producing,” explained Dr Cosima Porteus (University of Exeter, UK). “However, oceans are now growing dangerously more acidic as a result of this absorption.” To help predict the ecological impact of ocean acidification, Cosima’s research investigates the effects of increased carbon dioxide on the olfactory system in European sea bass – a vital organism for Europe’s fishing industry. “My experiments reveal that the fish’s olfactory sensory neurons are less sensitive under high carbon dioxide conditions,” said Cosima. “This is such a strong effect that sea bass would need to be a staggering 60 per cent closer to the source to detect the same smell under normal conditions.” Cosima has also identified the potential genes behind these effects, including ion channels and olfactory receptors. “This work has big implications for European sea bass and their ability to survive ocean acidification,” she concluded. “It was an honour being able to present my work at the SEB annual meeting this year.” 

2016 YSAS Winner - Animal Section: Lauren Nadler

YSAS 2016

Humans are not alone in their need to chill out with friends; some shoaling fish species also are less stressed when they are together. Young Scientist Award Winner Miss Lauren Nadler (James Cook University, Australia) studied this ‘calming effect’ of shoaling on individual fishes, saying: “Many species practice safety in numbers in the animal kingdom, as having “many eyes” helps them detect looming predators. Therefore, gregarious fishes like the blue-green puller (Chromis viridis) might feel safer and less stressed when in a shoal.” Using a novel respirometry method to measure metabolic rates – commonly used as an indicator of stress – Lauren found that individuals exposed to cues of shoal-mates had lower metabolic rates, and hence stress, than individuals tested by themselves. “This supports the idea of a calming effect of shoaling,” said Lauren. Another part of Lauren’s prize-winning research was finding that this calming shoal effect is maintained even under projected climate change conditions. “Atmospheric and ocean levels of carbon dioxide are on the rise largely due to human activities,” explained Lauren. “As the calming effect of shoaling will likely be maintained into the future, group living may become even more important, possibly as a behavioural mechanism to counteract stress and increasing energy needs.”  

2012 YSAS Winner - Plant Section: Ben Williams

Assistant Professor

Post-Doctoral Research: Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts

2013 Ph.D. Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge, UK.

2009 B.A. Biological Sciences, Wadham College, Oxford University, UK.

Research

The Williams lab is interested in answering fundamental questions about plant epigenetics. Epigenetics is the study of heritable information that is not contained within the DNA sequence of the genome. One example of this is DNA methylation - a reversible chemical modification to DNA that can be added or removed by specialized enzymes. The questions we are interested in include:

• How do the enzymes that add and remove DNA methylation find which sequences to act upon with precision?

• How do DNA methylation patterns get accurately inherited over many generations?

• How do cells recognize new sequences and establish the correct epigenetic state?

• How do these mechanisms function during the development of tissues and organs?

To learn more about ongoing projects in the Williams lab, visit the lab website!

YSAS 2012

What did winning the YSAS award mean to you, and how has your career has progressed since then?

The award meant a huge amount to me at the time. I remember feeling like it was the first time I felt I had a realistic shot at a science career and it gave me the confidence to really go for it, applying to exciting postdoc labs that would stretch me as a scientist. On a more practical note, my papers weren't finished when I was applying for postdoc positions, and I'm certain the award made me a more noticeable candidate, with the promise that my PhD work was worth hearing about.

In 2013 I moved to the Whitehad Institute for Biomedical Research for a postdoc, and since 2020 I've been running a lab in the Department of Plant Biology at UC Berkeley.

 

: @@WilliamsSci

2011 YSAS Winner - Animal Section: Wilco Verberk

Associate Professor, Radboud University Nijmegen

YSAS 2011

Bridging the fields of ecology and physiology 

Looking back at the Young Scientist Award from 2011 brings back many good memories. It was a time when I was halfway in my postdoctoral research at the University of Plymouth, and the first papers of my work there were ‘in the pipeline’. I relished the freedom of pursuing my own research interests as a postdoc, having secured my own funding. The academic atmosphere at the university was great and I had many stimulating discussions with fellow post-docs and also with staff and PhD students. But I also remember feeling pressure. This is because I had convinced my wife and children to follow me to Plymouth and leave friends and family behind. So, to make it worthwhile I figured I must come up with some good science. Luckily, I had extremely supportive and helpful mentors that helped shape my thinking and how I do science today. 

What I set out to do was to test whether warming of freshwater ecosystems jeopardizes the insects living there. Not because of heat stress per se, but because they perhaps could not extract sufficient oxygen from the water to meet their elevated oxygen demand. This was a new field for me. I knew about aquatic insects and their life-history, but my knowledge on how their physiology is affected by temperature and water oxygenation was rudimentary to say the least. So, I read up on respiratory physiology and thermal biology and at the same time I did experiments, measuring the rate at which aquatic insects (or rather their juvenile stages) consume oxygen at different temperatures and comparing insects with different modes of breathing (aquatic insects are excellent models for this purpose!). 

During the experiments it became clear that the oxygen electrodes were very sensitive to temperature. Intriguingly, the signal increased with temperature, suggestive of a higher oxygen flux. But trained as an ecologist, this did not make sense as warmer water holds less oxygen. I set out to reconcile these different viewpoints and found out that although the pool of oxygen is smaller in warmer water, the flux of oxygen can actually be increased as temperature speeds up rates of oxygen diffusion. So, both the ecological perspective and the perspective from respiratory physiology provided a partial answer, but what was missing was a synthetic view. There were some attempts in the literature pointing towards this problem, but mostly the fields of ecology and physiology were being practiced by different people, who publish in different journals, making it possible for each field to ignore the wisdom of the other field. Together with my brother-in-law, who is a graphical artist, we produced an animation, explaining the work to a layman audience, which has over the years accumulated thousands of views on youtube. 

In 2011 I presented this work at the SEB meeting and was grateful to be awarded the Young Scientist Award. This meant so much to me: It gave me the confidence that my first strides in a new field were generating novel scientific insights. Now, in 2023, the effects of temperature and oxygen on aquatic ectotherms is still an important theme in my research. I have recently been involved in revising the chapter on respiration for the standard textbook on aquatic insects, which will hopefully expose a new generation of ecologists to the principles of respiratory physiology. In addition, my work has broaded beyond heat tolerance to also investigate how temperature and oxygen shape growth and development. I have taken both a cellular perspective on this problem doing in-depth experiments on animals differing in cell size and employ comparative analyses on large groups of species to derive general principles. My research shows that oxygen is one of the most important drivers for aquatic life and that combining an ecological and a physiological perspective can yield important insights. Much of this work can be traced back to these beginnings; the adventure it was and the leap in the dark, have enhanced my life and it was a great support to receive the Yound Scientist Award from the SEB at that time. 

Screenshot of the animation explaining the different perspectives on oxygen availability. Link: 
https://youtu.be/aUPQT8GNt4A