Anna Dewar wins Early Career Investigator Award

The ASN Early Career Investigator Award was established in 1984 to recognise outstanding and promising work by early-career researchers in the fields of Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, Behavioral Ecology, and Genetics. The competition is open to researchers in the final year of doctoral study and those who received their doctorate no more than three years before the application deadline.

This award was established in memory of Jasper Loftus-Hills (1946–1974), an Australian biologist of exceptional promise, whose career was cut short just three years after receiving his degree. Four awards are made annually.

The 2025 winners are Elizabeth Carlen, Ashwini Ramesh, Jessie Williamson, and Anna Dewar. Dr Dewar is a Career Development Research Fellow in Biology at St John's College, Oxford.

As well as being presented with a financial award, Dr Dewar will give a research paper at the annual meeting of the American Society of Naturalists in Athens, Georgia, USA. Her paper will be titled 'Bacterial genome evolution: plasmids, pangenomes and phylogenetics'.

You can learn more about Dr Dewar's work on bacterial genome evolution here.

Speaking of the award, Dr Dewar said 'I’m really honoured to be one of the recipients of this year’s ASN Early Career Investigator Award. In my research so far I’ve used methods developed by evolutionary biologists to analyse large datasets of bacterial genomes. This has allowed me to gain broad insights into how bacteria interact with one another and to explain variation across the genomes of many different species – so it’s fantastic that this interdisciplinary approach has been recognised by the ASN. I’m really looking forward to presenting my research at Evolution this summer.'

Congratulations, Anna!