Dr Sarah Myers, who recently completed her PhD at the School, Dr Sarah Johns and former staff member Dr Oskar Burger have been awarded the George C. Williams Prize for the most significant article published in the flagship journal of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine & Public Health. Their paper is entitled Postnatal depression and reproductive success in modern, low-fertility contexts.
The prize consists of a $5000 award and travel, lodging and free registration to present the paper at the annual meeting of the Society, this year to be held in Groningen, Netherlands between August 18th and 21st.
The Prize recognises the contributions of George C Williams to evolutionary medicine, and aims to encourage and highlight important research in this growing field. In a seminal 1957 paper, Williams initiated work on several problems central to medicine, including an evolutionary theory of ageing and life history traits including menopause. He did important work on the problem of why sex exists. Perhaps his most lasting contribution is his 1966 book Adaptation and Natural Selection, a critique of group selection that transformed how biologists think about the evolution of sociality. In the 1990s he collaborated with Randolph Nesse on a series of papers and a book that inspired much ongoing work on how evolutionary biology can help us understand disease and improve human health.