2019 President Medallist

Dr Sonya Auer

Williams College

Sonya is an integrative biologist whose research focuses on understanding how organisms cope with environmental challenges. She is particularly interested in the role that metabolic constraints play in determining organismal performance across different environmental contexts and over ecological and evolutionary timescales. This keen interest in energetics was inspired by her work on how early environmental conditions shape energy allocation decisions later in life, first during her PhD under the supervision of David Reznick at the University of California-Riverside and then as a postdoctoral researcher with Tom Martin at the University of Montana.

Her more recent work as a postdoctoral researcher with Neil Metcalfe at the University of Glasgow probed deeper into ‘eco-evo-energetics’ and demonstrated important links between metabolic rate and key fitness-related traits, that metabolic rate is under selection in the wild, and that evolutionary changes in metabolic rate can facilitate life history adaptations to environmental challenges. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Biology Department at Williams College where her research extends this earlier work to consider how metabolic impacts on organismal performance at the individual level scale up to influence population dynamics and broader geographic patterns of local adaptation in wild fish populations.

Professor Daniel Gibbs

Professor of Molecular Plant Science, University of Birmingham

Daniel is Professor of Molecular Plant Science at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. His group uses a range of genetic, cell biology, and biochemical approaches to uncover new functions for protein degradation in the control of growth, development, and stress responsiveness. Current projects in the lab are focussed on investigating: (1) the connection between protein synthesis and degradation during mRNA translation; (2) how proteolytic control of repressive and activating chromatin modifying proteins regulates the epigenome in response to the environment, and (3) how protein degradation helps to coordinate meiotic recombination. Whilst he and his team are primarily focussed on studying the molecular processes underpinning plant biology, they also aim to identify new targets for improving key traits of agronomic significance, particularly linked to abiotic stress tolerance.

Professor Iain Johnston

University of Bergen

No bio provided