The New Phytologist Tansley Medal 2018 - Liana Burghardt and Jana Sperschneider.

Abstract

The New Phytologist Tansley Medal is awarded to outstanding scientists in the early stages of their careers in recognition of their contribution to the field (Woodward & Hetherington, 2010, 2011; Dolan, 2012, 2013, 2014; Lennon & Dolan, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018). We are delighted to announce that the latest Tansley Medal is to be awarded jointly to Dr Liana Burghardt and Dr Jana Sperschneider. Liana Burghardt is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Plant Science at Pennsylvania State University (USA). She works primarily on the nitrogen-fixing symbiosis between rhizobial bacteria and leguminous plants (specifically Medicago–Ensifer), and her work uses evolutionary and ecological approaches and advances in sequencing technology to understand mutualistic interactions in natural and agricultural systems in a changing climate. This is the focus of her Tansley insight ‘Evolving together, evolving apart: measuring the fitness of rhizobial bacteria in and out of symbiosis with leguminous plants’ in this issue of New Phytologist (Burghardt, 2020, pp. 28–34). Jana Sperschneider is an ARC DECRA (Discovery Early Career Researcher Award) fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. Jana is a bioinformatician interested in the interactions between plants and their pathogens. Her work involves using computational techniques to gain new insights into plant–pathogen relationships, and her contribution includes widely used software tools for fungal effector prediction using machine learning. Jana's Tansley insight ‘Machine learning in plant–pathogen interactions: empowering biological predictions from field scale to genome scale’ (Sperschneider, 2020; pp. 35–41 in this issue of New Phytologist), focuses on machine learning (ML) applications in areas in plant–pathogen interactions and highlights benefits and challenges in using ML approaches. For more information on Liana and Jana, and their research, please see the Profile articles in this issue of the journal (pp. 24–26), and visit the Tansley Medal pages of the New Phytologist Foundation website, https://www.newphytologist.org/awards/tansleymedal. Charlotte Grossiord and James Schnable are recipients of honourable mentions. Charlotte is Professor and group leader at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research and she is recognised for her Tansley insight ‘Having the right neighbors: how tree species diversity modulates drought impacts on forests’ (in this issue of New Phytologist, pp. 42–49). James Schnable is Charles O. Gardner Professor of Maize Quantitative Genetics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (USA) and he is honoured for his Tansley insight ‘Genes and gene models, an important distinction’ (in this issue of New Phytologist, pp. 50–55). We are delighted to offer our congratulations to Liana, Jana, Charlotte and James. We wish them well in their future careers and look forward to their continued success. The judging panel was comprised of the following New Phytologist Editors: Prof. Amy Austin, Prof. Liam Dolan, Prof. Elena Kramer and Prof. Natalia Requena.