Research prizes for PhD students

Two PhD students from the MEEP Lab have won prizes for their research.

Sebastian Duchene has been awarded the Faculty of Science Postgraduate Research Prize for Outstanding Academic Achievement. This prize was awarded on recommendation of the Dean of the Faculty. Sebastian has received this prize for this paper entitled “Analyses of evolutionary dynamics in viruses are hindered by a time-dependent bias in rate estimates”, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B.

Sebastian recently received his PhD for his thesis entitled “Understanding Evolutionary Rate Variation in Viruses”. The thesis dealt with various aspects of virus evolution, approached using phlyogenetic methods. Sebastián’s doctoral work included the development of methods and software for the analysis of nucleotide sequences.

Andrew Ritchie won the Prize for Best Poster at the Conference on Species Delimitation in the Age of Genomics, held in Canberra in late April. His poster was entitled “Evaluating the impact of the tree prior on molecular dating across species boundaries”.

Congratulations Sebastian and Andrew!