Tansley Medal Past Winners
Tansley Medal 2022 winners
It is our great pleasure to announce that the 2022 New Phytologist Tansley Medal for Excellence in Plant Science has been awarded jointly to Leander Anderegg and Moi Exposito-Alonso.
Read about the winners and runners up here.
Leander Anderegg
Moi Exposito-Alonso
Hear from recent Tansley Medal winners in our series of New Phytologist Now webinars.
- 19 October | Leander Anderegg: Why can't we predict traits from the environment?
- 23 October | Moi Exposito-Alonso: Understanding local plant extinctions before it's too late
Tansley Medal 2021 winners
It is our great pleasure to announce that the 2021 New Phytologist Tansley Medal for Excellence in Plant Science has been awarded jointly to Michal Bogdziewicz and Anna T Trugman.
Read about the winners and runners up here.
Watch Anna and Michal's New Phytologist Now webinars where they talk about their research
Tansley Medal 2020 winner
We are delighted to announce that the 2020 New Phytologist Tansley Medal for Excellence in Plant Science was awarded to Tommaso Jucker of the University of Bristol, UK. Tommaso's Tansley insight is titled 'Deciphering the fingerprint of distubrance on the three-dimensional structure of the world's forests'.
Tommaso Jucker
We also congratulate two outstanding runners-up:
- Lingfei Hu, Institute of Soil and Water Resources and Environmental Science, Zhejian University, China: Integration of mulitple volatile cues into plant defense responses
- Petra Marhava, Umea Plant Science Centre, University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden: Recent developments in the understanding of PIN polarity
Read the Editorial by Slater and Dolan announcing the 2020 Tansley Medal winner.
The judging panel for the 2020 competition was comprised of New Phytologist Editors Amy Austin, Liam Dolan, and Elena Kramer.
Tansley Medal 2019 winners
We are delighted to announce two winners for this year's New Phytologist Tansley Medal for Excellence in Plant Science! The judges voted to award two Tansley Medals to:
- Philippa Borrill, for her Tansley insight: Blurring the boundaries between cereal crops and model plants
- Kai Zhu, for his Tansley insight: Understanding forest dynamics by integrating age and environmental change
Philippa Borrill |
. Kai Zhu |
We also congratulate three runners up:
- Marjorie Lundgren: C2 photosynthesis: a promising route towards crop improvement?
- Renske Onstein: Darwin’s second ‘abominable mystery’: trait flexibility as the innovation leading to angiosperm diversity
- Dongqing Xu: COP1 and BBXs?HY5?mediated light signal transduction in plants
The judging panel was comprised of New Phytologist Editors Prof. Amy Austin, Prof. Liam Dolan, and Prof. Elena Kramer.
Read the Editorial by Lennon & Dolan, The New Phytologist Tansley Medal 2019
Tansley Medal 2018 winners
We are very pleased to celebrate two winners for this year's New Phytologist Tansley Medal for Excellence in Plant Science! The judges voted to award the prize jointly to:
- Liana Burghardt, for her Tansley insight 'Evolving together, evolving apart: Measuring the fitness of rhizobial bacteria in and out of symbiosis with leguminous plants'
- Jana Sperschneider, for her Tansley insight 'Machine learning in plant-pathogen interactions: empowering biological predictions from field-scale to genome-scale'
Liana Burghardt |
Jana Sperschneider |
We also congratulate two researchers who have received honourable mentions:
- James Schable, for his Tansley insight 'Genes and Gene Models, an important distinction'
- Charlotte Grossiord, for her Tansley insight 'Having the right neighbors: how tree species diversity modulates drought impacts on forests'
The judging panel was comprised of New Phytologist Editors Prof. Amy Austin, Prof. Liam Dolan, Prof. Elena Kramer, and Prof. Natalia Requena.
Read the Editorial by Lennon & Dolan The New Phytologist Tansley Medal 2018 – Liana Burghardt and Jana Sperschneider
Tansley Medal 2017 winner
We are delighted to announce the winner of the 2017 New Phytologist Tansley Medal for Excellence in Plant Science. This year, the judges have decided to award the Medal to Stella Cesari, of INRA, UMR-BGPI, Montpellier, France. Stella’s Tansley insight is titled ‘Multiple strategies for pathogen perception by plant immune receptors’
Stella Cesari, winner of the 2017 New Phytologist Tansley Medal for excellence in plant science
The quality of finalists this year was very high. The details of the runners up and their Tansley insights are below:
- Yangnan Gu, Tsinghua University: Nuclear pore complex: a strategic platform to regulate cellular signaling
- Sean Michaletz, University of Arizona: Evaluating the kinetic basis of plant growth from organs to ecosystems
- Carla Staver, Yale University: Prediction and scale in savanna ecosystems
- Sambasivam Periyannan, CSIRO: Sustaining global agriculture through rapid detection and deployment of genetic resistance to deadly crop diseases
- Emily Josephs, UC Davis: Determining the evolutionary forces shaping GxE
The judging panel was comprised of New Phytologist Editors Prof. Amy Austin, Prof. Liam Dolan, Prof. Alistair Hetherington, Prof. Elena Kramer, and Prof. Natalia Requena.
Read the Editorial by Lennon and Dolan, the New Phytologist Tansley Medal 2017
2016
Winner: Etienne Laliberté - Below-ground frontiers in trait-based plant ecology
Read the Editorial by Sarah Lennon and Liam Dolan.
Watch an interview with Etienne Laliberté:
Runners up:
- Marie Barberon, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland: The endodermis as a checkpoint for nutrients
- Charles W. Melnyk, The Sainsbury Laboratory, Cambridge, UK: Connecting the plant vasculature to friend or foe
- Roberto Salguero-Gómez, University of Sheffield, UK: Applications of the fast–slow continuum and reproductive strategy framework of plant life histories
- Benjamin Schwessinger, Australian National University, Australia: Fundamental wheat stripe rust research in the 21st century
2015
Winner: Alexander Jones - A new look at stress: abscisic acid patterns and dynamics at high-resolution
Read the Editorial by Sarah Lennon and Liam Dolan.
Runners up:
- Plant fitness in a rapidly changing world, Jill Anderson
- Integrating plant carbon dynamics with mutualism ecology, Elizabeth Pringle
- Subversion of plant cellular functions by bacterial type-III effectors: beyond suppression of immunity, Alberto Macho
- Comparative epigenomics: a powerful tool to understand the evolution of DNA methylation, Xuehua Zhong
- Geminiviruses for biotechnology: the art of parasite taming, Rosa Lozano-Durán
- A community genetics perspective: Opportunities for the coming decade, Gregory Crutsinger
- Wiring a plant: genetic networks for phloem formation in Arabidopsis thaliana roots, Antia Rodriguez-Villalon
2014
Winner: William Anderegg: Spatial and temporal variation in plant hydraulic traits and their relevance for climate change impacts on vegetation
Read the Editorial by Sarah Lennon and Liam Dolan.
Runners up:
Stuart Campbell: Ecological mechanisms for the coevolution of mating systems and defence
Pieter De Frenne: Innovative empirical approaches for inferring climate-warming impacts on plants in remote areas
Jesse Hollister: Polyploidy: adaptation to the genomic environment
Masayoshi Nakamura: Microtubule nucleating and severing enzymes for modifying microtubule array organization and cell morphogenesis in response to environmental cues
Diane Saunders: Hitchhiker’s guide to multi-dimensional plant pathology
Daniel Sloan: Using plants to elucidate the mechanisms of cytonuclear co-evolution
2013
Joint winners:
Li-Qing Chen: SWEET sugar transporters for phloem transport and pathogen nutrition
Jing-Ke Weng: The evolutionary paths towards complexity: a metabolic perspective
Read the Editorial by Liam Dolan.
Read the interview with Li-Qing Chen.
Read the interview with Jing-Ke Weng.
Runners up:
Jacquelyn Gill: Ecological impacts of the Later Quaternary megaherbivore extinctions
Elizabeth Wolkovich: Progress towards an interdisciplinary science of plant phenology: building predictions across space, time and species diversity
2012
Winner: Robin Hopkins: Reinforcement in plants.
Read the Editorial by Liam Dolan.
Read the interview with Robin Hopkins.
Runner up:
Erik Verbruggen, Mycorrhizal fungal establishment in agricultural soils: factors determining inoculation success.
2011
Winner: Neil Dalchau: Understanding biological timing using mechanistic and black-box models.
Read the Editorial by Liam Dolan
Runners up:
Ive De Smet, Lateral Root Initiation: growing a new meristem goes through asymmetric cell division infancy
Charles Price, The structure, scaling and functional impacts of complex leaf venation networks
Shiv Kale, Oomycete and fungal effector entry, a modern Trojan horse
2010
Winner: Frederic Lens: Testing hypotheses that link wood anatomy to cavitation resistance and hydraulic conductivity in the genusAcer
Read the Editorial by Ian Woodward and Alistair Hetherington.
Runners up:
Francesco Licausi, Regulation of the molecular response to oxygen limitations in plants
Younousse Saidi, Heat perception and signalling in plants: a tortuous path to thermotolerance
Nicole Hughes, Winter leaf reddening in ‘evergreen’ species
2009
Winner: Steven Spoel: Post-translational protein modification as a tool for transcription reprogramming
Read the Editorial by Ian Woodward and Alistair Hetherington.
Runners up:
Ward Capoen, Sesbania rostrata: a case study of natural variation in legume nodulation
Colleen Iversen, Digging deeper: fine-root responses to rising atmospheric CO2concentration in forested ecosystems
Katherine McCulloh, Moving water well: comparing hydraulic efficiency in twigs and trunks of coniferous, ring-porous, and diffuse-porous saplings from temperate and tropical forests
Rebecca Mosher, Maternal control of Pol IV-dependent siRNAs in Arabidopsis endosperm
Nicolas Rouhier, Plant glutaredoxins: pivotal players in redox biology and iron–sulphur center assembly