Presentation of the 2012 Charles Schuchert Award of the Paleontological Society to Gene Hunt

Abstract

I am delighted and honored to present Gene Hunt as the winner of the 2012 Charles Schuchert Award. Gene has truly become a leader in evolutionary paleontology, skilled at turning challenging problems into crisp questions that can be addressed in the fossil record in creative and rigorous ways. I recently reread a letter that rightly praises Gene for his “impressive skill with both analytic and synthetic thinking” and his remarkable ability to ask questions “in his rather unassuming way” that “strike right to the conceptual core” of an issue. What's remarkable about this letter is that it wasn't written in support of his nomination for this award but was sent in connection with his application to graduate school. This raises two points. First, it can be risky to recruit as presenter someone with a long history with the recipient, although I can assure Gene of my discretion in this regard. And second, it attests that Gene showed great talent and promise at a very early stage. Gene finished his Bachelor's in Biology at Duke University with little direct experience in paleontology, although he clearly was already interested in larger-scale, macroevolutionary questions. His first serious encounter with paleontology was as a summer intern in the Smithsonian's terrific Research Training Program, where he analyzed ontogenetic shape changes in agnostids (which may or may not be trilobites). I think he still had trilobites in mind when he arrived in Chicago, in fact I remember his frighteningly precocious brown-bag talk as an early grad student, on his agnostid work and his approaches to partitioning specimens into discrete instars. As a graduate student Gene became especially interested in bridging between micro- and macroevolution, not in a simplistic extrapolationist way but in terms of really coming to grips with how processes at the organismic and population …