EERC PGR Paper Awards

Every year, the Manchester Metropolitan University's Environmental Research Centre awards three prizes for best paper published by its postgraduate students in the previous 12 months.

This year, judges expressed how difficult it was to decide on the winners, especially with the variety of different types of environmental research presented.

Nonetheless, three winners were awarded for their publications and one for presentation. First and second prizes were awarded to members of the Ecological Genetics & Conservation group! Graeme Fox (first prize) and John Paul Kennedy (second prize) are both supervised by Prof Richard Preziosi and Dr Jennifer Rowntree, and published their research in Molecular Ecology and Molecular Ecology Resources. Congratulations to them both!

Graeme, who recently finished his PhD and is now a postdoc in the Rowntree lab, won first prize with a paper describing a new pipeline for developing microsatellite markers more efficiently and cost-effectively. You can read the open access paper here.

Fox, G., Preziosi, R. F., Antwis, R. E., Benavides-Serrato, M., Combe, F. J., Harris, W. E., Hartley, I. R., Kitchener, A. C., de Kort, S. R., Nekaris, A.-I., Rowntree, J. K. (2019). Multi‐individual microsatellite identification: A multiple genome approach to microsatellite design (MiMi). Molecular Ecology Resources 2019;19: 1672–1680.

John Paul's paper won second prize and is about the genetic diversity of mangroves at their range margins. You can read or download the open access paper here.

Kennedy, J. P., Preziosi, R. F., Rowntree, J. K., Feller, I. C. (2020). Is the central‐marginal hypothesis a general rule? Evidence from three distributions of an expanding mangrove species, Avicennia germinans (L.) L. Molecular Ecology. 2020;29: 704-719.