Meredith Cenzer received the 2018 American Naturalist Student Paper Award for her impressive paper “Maladaptive Plasticity Masks the Effects of Natural Selection in the Red-Shouldered Soapberry Bug” (Am Nat 190:521-533). The award committee said, “In this work, Dr. Cenzer leveraged a unique opportunity to quantify maladaptive plasticity and explore its consequences; she designed and executed difficult experiments and capitalized on an unexpected result to draw big and convincing conclusions. We particularly appreciated how her study incorporates measures of selection, population effects (presumably genetic), and common-garden rearing to quantify plasticity. We found her paper to be an elegant combination of ecology, evolution, behavior, and natural history. While it focuses on a single system, maladaptive plasticity is so rarely investigated that we became convinced that hers will come to be considered a landmark study. It is particularly sophisticated work for a single-authored graduate student publication. (Read her summary here: https://amnat.org/an/newpapers/OctCenzer.html)”
Timing is everything.