2023 QBioS Student Awards

Congratulations to our QBioS award winners for 2023, who were recognized at the Winter Formal on December 6.  In what has now become an annual tradition, we grant awards for papers published and for community outreach and service.

Best paper in Cellular and Molecular Biosciences goes to Katie MacGillivray, for her first-author paper “Trade-offs constrain adaptive pathways to type VI secretion system resistance”, published a month ago in iScience.

Best paper in Ecology, Evolution, and Population Biology goes to Athulya Ram, for her first-author paper Local Immunodeficiency: Combining Cross-Immunoreactivity Networks, published this April in the Journal of Computational Biology.

Distinguished Paper in Ecology, Evolution, and Population Biology goes to Rozenn Pineau, for her first-author paper Emergence and maintenance of stable coexistence during a long-term multicellular evolution experiment, currently under review at Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Best paper in Organismal Behavior and Physiology goes to Pablo Bravo, for his first-author paper “Vertical growth dynamics of biofilms”, published this March in PNAS.

Distinguished paper in Organismal Behavior and Physiology goes to Ethan Wold, for his first-author paper “Structural damping renders the hawkmoth exoskeleton mechanically insensitive to non-sinusoidal deformations”, published this May in Proceedings of the Royal Society Interface.

And finally, Cassie Shriver is awarded the QBioS Community Outreach and Service Award, for her role in implementing the "Biomechanics Day: Animals in Motion" outreach event at Zoo Atlanta. The event, which took place on March 11, 2023, was a major success, breaking the zoo's record for typical weekend attendance with over 8,000 guests, including children and educators. Shriver was instrumental in organizing the event, liaising with zoo staff, and coordinating researchers from various universities. The success of Biomechanics Day provides a significant platform for science communication and inspires the next generation of biomechanics researchers.

We’d also like to recognize the QBioS Student Government Association with the QBioS Community Outreach and Service Award (group category). This award goes to Emma Bingham, Chris Zhang, Sayantan Datta, Ray Copeland, Alfie Brownless, Elisa Rheaume.

Over the past year, the qSGA organized biweekly coffee hours, created a mentorship program for new students, organized many social events, and annual gatherings like this one! They also figured out how to fund many of these activities from GT. By providing opportunities for interaction and networking among students from different fields of study, the qSGA aims to build an inclusive, interdisciplinary academic community within the QBioS Ph.D. program.