Posted on behalf of the Harry Smith Prize Selection Committee.
The editorial board of the journal Molecular Ecology has established a new prize to recognize the best paper published in Molecular Ecology in the previous year by graduate students or early career scholars with no more than five years of postdoctoral or fellowship experience.
The prize comes with a cash award of US$1000 and an announcement in the journal. The winner will also be asked to join a junior editorial board for the journal to offer advice on changing research needs and potentially serve as a guest editor. As with the Molecular Ecology Prize, the winner of this annual prize will be selected by an independent award committee.
The prize is named after Professor Harry Smith FRS, who founded the journal and served as both its Chief and Managing Editor during the journal’s critical early years. He continued as the journal’s Managing Editor until 2008, and he went out of his way to encourage early career scholars. In addition to his editorial work, Harry was one of the world’s foremost researchers in photomorphogenesis, where he determined how plants respond to shading, leading to concepts such as “neighbour detection” and “shade avoidance”; which are fundamental to understanding plant responses to crowding and competition. More broadly his research provided an early example of how molecular data could inform ecology, and in 2008 he was awarded the Molecular Ecology Prize that recognized both his scientific and editorial contributions to the field.
Please send your nomination with a short supporting statement (no more than 250 words; longer submissions will not be accepted) directly to Rose Andrew (randre20@une.edu.au) by Tuesday 31 July 2018.
With thanks on behalf of the Harry Smith Prize Selection Committee
