Sewall Wright Award
Michael Whitlock

Richard Lenski is the 2012 recipient of the Sewall Wright Award from the American Society of Naturalists. The Sewall Wright Award, established in 1991, honors a senior but still active investigator who is making fundamental contributions to the Society’s goals, namely, promoting the conceptual unification of the biological sciences. Rich Lenski is extraordinarily deserving of this award.

Rich Lenski’s long-term work in experimental evolution with E. coli has set a high standard for work in this important field, which he is largely responsible for developing. This experiment, now well over 50,000 generations, has led to groundbreaking analyses showing how evolution can work. The results of this and other highly original experimental evolution experiments by Lenski and his group have led to novel insights in a wide variety of evolutionary topics and have inspired similar studies by many other laboratories worldwide. His work and that of his collaborators has led to key insights into an impressive range of fundamental topics, including the nature of constraints on evolution, epistasis, pleiotropy, adaptive landscapes, life history, the role of chance and contingency, acclimation, evolution of specialization, evolution of mutation rates, maintenance of genetic variation, clonal interference, repeatability of evolution, gene regulation, and genomics. As if this were not enough, Lenski and collaborators have pioneered the study of evolution in digital organisms, with similarly pathbreaking results on the evolution of robustness, complexity, specialization, mutation, and sex. Lenski has published well over 200 papers in prestigious journals, including 13 in the American Naturalist.

Lenski’s contribution to biology extends beyond his papers, through his mentorship of 23 postdocs and 27 graduate students who have worked in his lab (so far). The list of these trainees reads like a partial Who’s Who in experimental evolution.

Among his previous awards are the Guggenheim Fellowship and MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and election to several prestigious scientific bodies, including the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Science, and the National Academy of Sciences. Lenski was awarded the American Society of Naturalists Presidential Award for the best paper of the year in the American Naturalist, and he is the only person to have won this award twice, including for the first paper reporting on the long-term E. coli experiment in 1991; this remains his most-cited paper.

Throughout his career, Rich Lenski has combined a careful experimental approach with a broad curiosity about the mechanisms of evolution. His work has demonstrated that even the simplest of organisms in the most basic of environments can, if combined with a fertile mind and penetrating questions, provide insights that aid in conceptually unifying diverse areas of biology.

E. O. Wilson Naturalist Award
David M. Hillis

The Edward O. Wilson Naturalist Award is meant to honor a person for contributions to understanding a particular group of organisms and for enhancing appreciation of the ecology and evolution of those organisms through the written word. Keith A. Crandall has such diverse research interests that those familiar with his significant contributions to computational biology or molecular evolution may not be aware that he is also an international leader in the study of the biodiversity, evolution, and ecology of crustaceans. He has inspired numerous students and postdocs with his engaging energy, his devotion to teaching and outreach, and his remarkable research career.

Crandall’s particular interest among the crustaceans is the crayfishes, a relatively poorly studied group despite their remarkable diversity and importance in North American freshwater ecosystems. He has contributed to understanding the population genetics, systematics, ecology, molecular evolution, and conservation biology of crayfishes worldwide, with a particular emphasis on the North American radiation.

In addition, Crandall has applied his experience with this group to write broadly about methods and theory in conservation biology, phylogeny, population genetics, and molecular evolution. This broad methodological and theoretical background, in turn, has allowed Crandall to apply his skills to many other practical problems that involve evolutionary biology, from the evolution of HIV to the evolution of breeds of dogs. His research publications have been cited more than 33,000 times, placing him among the most influential of researchers in the fields of biodiversity and evolution. He has published four papers that have been cited more than 1,000 times and 30 papers that have been cited more than 100 times. The American Society of Naturalists is delighted to honor such a diverse and productive biologist as this year’s recipient of the E. O. Wilson Naturalist Award.