Siobhan O'Brien receives JMS award

Every year the European Society for Evolutionary Biology awards the John Maynard Smith Prize to an outstanding young evolutionary biologist. This year’s winner is Siobhan O’Brien, a postdoc in the lab of Greg Velicer and working in the ACE programme. Siobhan O’Brien will give the John Maynard Smith Lecture at the Joint Evolution congress in August in Montpellier, France. The award itself includes a prize of 2,500 euro and she will also get to carry out a 3-month fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin next year.

Siobhan is an evolutionary ecologist, interested in understanding how microbial social interactions shape the world around us. She completed her PhD in 2015, under the supervision of Angus Buckling at the University of Exeter, studying the evolutionary ecology of microbial social interactions in complex environments. She then secured a two-year fellowship with the Centre for Chronic Diseases and Disorders at the University of York, working closely with Mike Brockhurst and collaborators at the University of Liverpool.

In 2017, she moved to Zurich to begin a fellowship in Greg Velicer's lab, funded by the Adaptation to a Changing Environment initiative at the ETH Zurich. Her current research focuses on understanding the ecology and evolution of social motility in the microbe Myxococus xanthus - particularly how it is shaped by multispecies interactions in its natural habitat.

The prestigious prize is named after John Maynard Smith (1920 – 2004), an eminent evolutionary biologist, and author of many books on evolution, both for scientists and the general public. He was a professor at the University of Sussex, UK, Fellow of the Royal Society, winner of the Darwin Medal, laureate of the Crafoord Prize of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, and President of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, (ESEB).

More information about the JMS Prize and previous winners is available on the ESEB website (external page www.eseb.org)