Announcing the winners of the 2022 New Phytologist Tansley Medal

Last updated: 16 Feb, 2023


We are delighted to announce that the 2022 New Phytologist Tansley Medal for excellence in plant science has been awarded jointly to Leander D.L. Anderegg and Moi Exposito-Alonso

 

Leander Anderegg
Leander Anderegg
Moi Exposito-Alonso
Moi Exposito-Alonso

 

Leander is an Assistant Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara (USA) whose work is driven by his fascination of the landscape-scale consequences of plant physiology. In his Tansley insight ‘Why can't we predict traits from the environment?’ Leander reviews the eco-evolutionary processes that drive trait variation at various ecological scales and their implications both for how we look for trait–environment relationships and for how we interpret trait variation. 

 

Moi is a Carnegie Staff Associate at the Departments of Plant Biology and Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science and Assistant Professor (by courtesy) of Biology at Stanford University (CA, USA). Moi’s expertise in plant evolutionary ecology, biology and genetics, combined with computational approaches, informs his research programme, which aims to forecast the evolutionary outcomes of populations under climate change, and to ultimately anticipate potential future biodiversity losses. These themes are explored in Moi’s Tansley insight ‘Understanding local plant extinctions before it’s too late: bridging evolutionary genomics with global ecology’. 

 

We also congratulate two outstanding Tansley Medal runners-up: 

 

Y. Anny Chung is a Haines Distinguished Assistant Professor in Field Botany (Belowground) in the Departments of Plant Biology and Plant Pathology at the University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA. Anny’s Tansley insight is titled ‘The temporal and spatial dimensions of plant–soil feedbacks’. 

 

J. Grey Monroe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California Davis, USA. Grey’s Tansley insight is titled ‘Potential and limits of (mal)adaptive mutation rate plasticity in plants’. 

 

New Phytologist Tansley Medal for excellence in plant science

 

The New Phytologist Tansley Medal for excellence in plant science is awarded annually in recognition of outstanding contributions to research by individuals in the early stages of their career. We offer our warmest congratulations to Leander, Moi and their fellow finalists, and wish them continued success in their future careers. 

 

The judging panel for the 2022 Tansley Medal was comprised of New Phytologist Editors Amy Austin (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Ian Dickie (Canterbury, New Zealand) Liam Dolan (Vienna, Austria), Elena Kramer (Cambridge, MA, USA) and Shuhua Yang (Beijing, China). 

 

Supporting early career scientists 

 

The New Phytologist Foundation supports early career plant scientists, through a number of initiatives including the annual Tansley Medal competition and the New Phytologist next generation scientists symposium. This year’s symposium will be held in Singapore, 2–5 July 2023.  Applications to attend will close on 26 February. The 2024 Tansley Medal competition will open later this summer, with an application deadline of 1 November 2023.  

 

We encourage applications from across the breadth of the plant science community – please share these opportunities with your colleagues and students world-wide! 

 

The New Phytologist Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation committed to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and research in plant science. The Foundation currently fulfils this objective by publishing the scholarly journals New Phytologist and Plants, People, Planet and by funding a wide range of activities, such as the international New Phytologist Symposia and Workshop series, awarding grants, and the sponsorship of awards such as the Tansley Medal, named after New Phytologist’s founder Sir Arthur Tansley.