Presidents' Award for Lifetime Achievement
The Presidents' Award for Lifetime Achievement is given to a person who has made outstanding and sustained contributions to the field over the course of many years. The recipient is selected by the three Presidents of the Society (President, President-Elect, and Past President). The interval between presentations of this award must be at least three years.
David L. Swofford (1998)
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The first award was presented to Dave Swofford in 1998. Systematists of a certain age will fondly remember the happy times spent resetting the date on their Macs in order to squeeze a little more life out of their beta copies of PAUP*. Swofford's PAUP program has had (from 1989 onward) a profound influence on the types of phylogenetic analyses possible in systematics. (Image from Duke Biology Department web site.)
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Joseph Felsenstein (2002)
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The second award was presented to Joseph Felsenstein in 2002. Joe is the author of the PHYLIP package, the book
Inferring Phylogenies (2004), and a pioneer in the use of statistical methods in phylogenetics. In particular, his 1981 paper Evolutionary trees from DNA sequences: A maximum likelihood approach (Journal of Molecular Evolution 17:368–376) laid the groundwork for all maximum likelihood and Bayesian phylogenetic methods used today. (Image from University of Washington Genome Sciences Department web site.) |
Ziheng Yang (2008)
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The third award was presented to Ziheng Yang in 2008. Early in his career, Ziheng introduced the now ubiquitous discrete gamma among-site rate heterogeneity to phylogenetics, and later pioneered the use of Bayesian methods in phylogenetics. In addition to many contributions to the primary literature of molecular evolution and phylogenetics, Ziheng has long maintained his influential software package PAML and authored two important books: Computational Molecular Evolution (2006) and Molecular Evolution: A Statistical Approach (2014). (Image from Center for Computational and Evolutionary Biology, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
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David Hillis (2012)
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The fourth award was presented to David Hillis in 2012. David Hillis has contributed greatly to SSB and to the field of systematics in many ways. In 1994, as president of SSB, he spearheaded the replacement of "Zoology" with "Biology" in the name of both the society and the journal. The 1996 book he co-edited with Craig Moritz and Barbara Mable, Molecular Systematics, served for more than a decade as the primary textbook for modern systematics and phylogenetics. Many of leaders in the Society and in the field of systematics have been trained in the Hillis lab, including 4 Mayr Award winners (McGuire, Poe, Messenger, and Huelsenbeck) and 1 past president (Huelsenbeck). (Image from University of Texas College of Natural Sciences website.)
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David and Wayne Maddison (2016)
The fifth and sixth awards were presented jointly to Wayne and David Maddison in 2016. As collaborators or individually they have been the creators of many of the core methods and software at the heart of modern systematics, investigating everything from character coevolution to diversification processes to estimates of gene flow. Their software includes Mesquite, MacClade and the Tree of Life Web project (TOLWeb). They are also noteworthy for their long term focus and care for their research organisms: beetles (David) and spiders (Wayne).
Chris Simon (2020)
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The seventh award was made to Chris Simon in 2020 and presented at the Virtual Evolution meetings in 2021. Chris is widely recognized as the worldwide expert on cicadas, including both the periodical cicadas of North America and the cicadas of New Zealand and Australia. She has a distinguished record of contributions at the interface of theory and applications, and her work, which has garnered more than 13,000 citations since 1994, has been influential in guiding methodological development of techniques for molecular phylogenetics. Chris has also had an early and ongoing role in promoting citizen science and science outreach. She has been a tireless advocate and promoter of the activities of SSB, with continuous involvement in society activities from 1993 onward, including service as Editor of Systematic Biology from 200-2004 and as President-Elect, President, and Past-President from 2006-2008. (Image from UConn Today).
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