We would like to congratulate Daniel G. Streicker who is the 2013 Grand Prize winner of the Science &; SciLifeLab Prize for Young Scientists. Daniel Streicker has focused his research on the question: How do ecology and evolution interact to allow viruses to spill into new host species?
In his interdisciplinary work, integrating ecological and evolutionary analyses of bats, he has started to uncover patterns in the origins of cross-species virus transmission and pathogen emergence. Bat rabies has shown it to be a surprisingly tractable system for answering some of those fundamental questions about how viruses emerge, and offers possibilities to gain insights that eventually may lead to novel ways to prevent spreading of diseases.
"This is a hugely important topic because we know that cross-species transmission is the most common source of newly emerging diseases, but it is really shocking and surprising how little we actually know about how pathogens do it," said Streicker in a podcast interview.
The new prize awards early-career scientists and includes a grand-prize award of US$25,000, supported by Science for Life Laboratory, a coordinated effort among four universities in Sweden, and the journal Science, which is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.
The categories for this annual award are genomics/proteomics/systems biology, developmental biology, molecular and cell biology as well as environmental life science.
Applicants for the 2013 Science & SciLifeLab Prize for Young Scientists submitted a 1000-word essay that was judged by an independent editorial team organized by the journal Science. Their essays were judged on the quality of research and the applicants’ ability to articulate how their work would contribute to the scientific field.
