Omenn Prize Awarded

The International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health has awarded the $5000 Omenn prize for the best article on a topic related to evolution, medicine, and public health published in the past year to Chelsea J. Weibel (photo above), Jenny Tung, Susan C. Alberts, and Elizabeth A. Archie for “Accelerated reproduction is not an adaptive response to early-life adversity in wild baboons” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Oct 2020, 117 (40) 24909-24919. 

The Committee also recognized three additional papers for honorable mention.

• Morley, V. J., Kinnear, C. L., Sim, D. G., Olson, S. N., Jackson, L. M., Hansen, E., Usher, G. A., Showalter, S. A., Pai, M. P., Woods, R. J., & Read, A. F. (2020) An adjunctive therapy administered with an antibiotic prevents enrichment of antibiotic-resistant clones of a colonizing opportunistic pathogen. eLife, 9, e58147.
• Crespi, B. (2020). Evolutionary medical insights into the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, 2020(1), 314-322.
• Dieltjens, L., Appermans, K., Lissens, M., Lories, B., Kim, W., Van der Eycken, E. V., Foster, K. R., & Steenackers, H. P. (2020). Inhibiting bacterial cooperation is an evolutionarily robust anti-biofilm strategy. Nature Communications, 11(1), 107.

ISEMPH thanks this year’s prize committee Caleb Finch (chair), Martin Brüne, Joe Graves, Jochim Kurtz, Chris Kuzawa, Anne Stone, and Carol Worthman and sponsor Gilbert Omenn for making this prize possible.