The SEB President's Medals are awarded annually to young scientists of outstanding merit. The awards are presented at the Annual Conference of the Society which usually takes place in the first week of July every year. There is one award per section of the Society (Animal; Cell; Plant).
Dr. Bipin Pandey is a plant biologist exploring the dynamic interface between roots and soils to uncover how plant roots sense and adapt to soil challenges. His research focuses on the mechanisms by which roots navigate complex soil environments, contributing to our understanding of plant nutrition and root biology. Dr. Pandey completed his early education in Basti, a small town in eastern Uttar Pradesh, India, and later pursued his PhD at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR) in New Delhi, where he earned his PhD specializing in plant nutrition and root biology. During the final year of his PhD, Dr. Pandey was awarded Newton-Bhabha Fellowship, which enabled him to collaborate with Professor Malcolm Bennett at the University of Nottingham. Here, he made significant contributions to understanding how root hair elongation and shallow root angles enhance phosphate uptake from the topsoil. This research sparked his enduring fascination with the mechanisms by which roots perceive and respond to the physical and chemical properties of soil.
In 2021, Dr. Pandey was awarded a BBSRC Discovery Fellowship to investigate how plant roots sense and respond to soil compaction. His interdisciplinary research revealed that the gaseous hormone ethylene plays a critical role in sensing soil compaction and orchestrates downstream signaling pathways involving ABA and auxin to mediate root responses. Building on this ground-breaking work, Dr. Pandey was awarded an ERC Starting Grant in 2023 to establish his independent research group. His team is now developing innovative tools and techniques to study how roots sense, respond, adapt, and shape their responses at cellular scales.
Dr. Raphael Pavani is a molecular biologist passionate about unraveling the intricacies of genome integrity and has dedicated his career to advancing our understanding of DNA replication, repair, and the molecular processes underlying diseases. Dr. Pavani earned his master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, where he studied DNA replication, repair, and cell cycle control in the pathogenic protozoan parasites T. cruzi and T. brucei, causative agents of Chagas Disease and Sleeping Sickness, respectively. During his Ph.D. studies, Dr. Pavani also embarked on an enriching internship at the University of Dundee in the UK, further broadening his expertise in biological chemistry and drug discovery. His PhD work resulted in numerous publications and the prestigious “Outstanding PhD Thesis Award” from the University of Sao Paulo.
In 2019, Dr. Pavani joined the Laboratory of Genome Integrity at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States, under the mentorship of Dr. André Nussenzweig. Among his significant contributions, he uncovered that the loss of EXO1 is synthetic lethal with BRCA1 deficiency, providing a promising avenue for targeted cancer therapies. Additionally, he developed a cutting-edge system to induce collapsed replication forks at specific genomic loci, revealing fundamental insights into replication-associated DNA damage. His research, recently published in Science, challenged the prevailing view that replication-associated breaks are exclusively one-ended breaks and demonstrated that homologous recombination (HR) is the primary repair pathway at broken forks. Moreover, he revealed that the mechanisms involved in repairing these lesions differ from those used in the repair of canonical, replication-independent double-strand breaks, advancing our understanding of DNA repair pathways and their therapeutic implications.
Sandra is originally from Montréal, Canada, where she completed a BSc Honors degree at McGill University studying seagrass community dynamics in Barbados. She remained at McGill for her master's degree where she discovered her love of fishes. Her master's research explored environmental drivers of intraspecific morphological variation in the jaws and gills of East African cichlids. During this time, she was also lucky enough to collaborate on several projects with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, which provided an opportunity to study the spread of an invasive crab in the Panama Canal as well as the ecology of coral reef fishes throughout the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. This experience led her to Australia, where she completed her PhD at the Australian National University in 2014 on morphological and physiological variation in coral reef fishes across gradients of waves and water motion. Diving on the Great Barrier Reef and observing cleaning stations was where she first got interested in host-parasite interactions. She moved to the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland where she continued to work on the Great Barrier Reef as a post-doc studying cleaning mutualisms and the role of parasitic infections on fish behaviour and cognition. In 2018, she began her position at the University of Montreal where she is currently an Associate Professor and the Canada Research Chair in the Eco-Evolution of Host-Parasite Interactions. She and her students now work mostly on freshwater fishes and their parasites in lakes around the Laurentian region in Québec. In addition to these diverse interests, Sandra also collaborates with theoreticians on the role of parasites in driving the evolution of host migratory behaviour as well as with the FIN club on topics ranging from thermal acclimation in ectotherms, premature hatching in aquatic embryos and ways to enhance transparency and collaboration in science.
Dr Emma Yhnell is an internationally multi-award-winning educator and science communicator, based at Cardiff University, Wales, United Kingdom. She is Associate Dean of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, and a Reader in Neuroscience. Emma obtained a BSc degree in Biochemistry before completing a PhD in Huntington’s disease. She then undertook a clinical research fellowship which demonstrated the need to provide accessible and engaging information and inspired her future work in science communication. She is a sought-after public speaker, having hosted a BBC radio series and contributed to DK books. Emma now teaches the next generation of scientists, as a National Teaching Fellow and Senior Fellow of AdvanceHE, she delivers memorable and interactive teaching with passion and infectious enthusiasm. As a first generation academic with expertise in equity, diversity and inclusion, Emma is changing the typical image of academia by making science more open, honest and fun.
