The SEB President’s Medals are awarded annually to young scientists of outstanding merit. This year’s awards will be presented at the SEB Annual Conference 2021, which takes place from 29 June - 8 July 2021. There is one award per section of the SEB (Animal, Cell, Plant).
Many congratulations to our very worthy winners of the 2021 SEB President’s Medal awards:
Erika recently started a new position as the Associate Dean of Science and Horticulture at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in BC, Canada. Prior to this transition, she was an Associate Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara for seven years. Erika received her BSc from Simon Fraser University, MSc and PhD from the University of British Columbia, and held an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Sydney and Carleton University. As an ecological physiologist, Erika uses a combination of field and lab-based studies to investigate how fish cope with anthropogenic stressors (e.g. temperature, fisheries interactions). Much of her research focuses on how climate change affects physiological performance across populations, age, body size, and sex in marine and freshwater fishes. Tackling both basic and applied questions, Erika’s research is informing conservation policy and enhancing the management of natural resources. Erika has served on the editorial board for ICES Journal of Marine Science, Journal of Fish Biology and Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. Dr. Eliason has been a Co-Editor of the Fish Physiology series since 2020. She was awarded the Cameron Award for the Best PhD Thesis in Zoology in Canada from the Canadian Society of Zoologists, the Boutilier New Investigator Award from the Canadian Society of Zoologists, and the President’s Medal for the Animal Section from the Society for Experimental Biology.
Marjorie is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and 2021 SEB Presidents Medallist in Plant Biology. She came to the Lancaster Environment Centre in 2018 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and won the Rank Prize New Lecturer Award in 2019. Prior to Lancaster, Marjorie did postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a visiting fellow at Harvard University, did her PhD and postdoctoral work at the University of Sheffield, and worked in industry at Mendel Biotechnology in California. She has been an active member of the SEB Plant Environmental Physiology Group throughout her academic career.
Her research group studies the evolution, biogeography, and eco-physiology of the vast array of photosynthetic diversity found in nature to identify the precise modifications that created the diverse range of photosynthetic metabolisms seen today. Her own research focuses on characterising and utilising photosynthetic diversity, with a particular focus on C3-C4 intermediate phenotypes and C2 photosynthesis. Her current work aims to engineer the rare C2 mode of photosynthesis into C3 Brassica crops to improve yield and stress tolerance of these important nutrient-dense crops.
