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Student Award winners of the Spring!
![Le crapaud d'Amérique (Bufo americanus)](https://www.mcgill.ca/redpath/files/redpath/styles/fullwidth_breakpoints_theme_moriarty_small_1x/public/channels/image/jessica_ford_-_bufo_skeleton_scan.jpg?itok=WaKkFQ0i×tamp=1623339790)
Congratulations to our student Award winners at the Museum this spring!
The Museum is proud to announce two winners of the annual REDME (Redpath Museum Excellence Award) this year.
The twin sisters Micaela and Yael Lewis finished their B.Sc. in Biology, both minoring in Natural History. Yael and Micaela have been very involved in the McGill Debating Union and within the Museum's public program for over 5 years. You can see them in action on Sept. 27 as student ambassadors for the Bicentennial STARS series.
At the Biology Department Day held on April 23, 2021, the Museum’s students won a variety of categories:
- Charles Cong Xu for Best Talk and for Most Memorable talk;
- Jonathan Diamond for Best talk by a First Year grad student and for Best Humour in a Talk and for Most likely to be featured in CBC’s Quirks and Quarks;
- Dirley Cortés for Best visual design in a talk;
- Alexandre Demers-Potvin for Making the best with what you had;
- and Jessica Ford for second place under Best Art. Jessica created the pen and ink drawing of the American toad (Bufo americanus) which accompanies this article.
- Ella Martin, a student co-supervised in the Hendry Lab, won first place in Best Art.
Six of the Museum’s graduate students received NSERC (National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada) awards this year. Four of these students received Postgraduate Scholarship-Doctoral support for 3 years. They are:
- Janay Fox (from Rowan Barrett Lab) for her project entitled: Does exposure to predation stress shape behaviour through epigenetics?;
- Alexandre Demers-Potvin (from the Larsson Lab) for his project: Determining the effects of climate change and environmental change in Late Cretaceous Canada using the faunas and floras of the Dinosaur Park Formation;
- and Alexis Heckley (from the Rowan Barrett Lab) for his project entitled: Evolutionary history and parasite effects on host dispersal shape disease dynamics;
- and Tiago Simones, a new student with the Larsson Lab starting this fall.
Victoria Tawa (from the Green lab) was awarded an Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship-Master’s to research the responses of frogs and toads to multiple types of disturbance.
Three students won Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ) Fellowships:
- Jessica Ford (from Green lab) will use the funds to work on her Ph.D. project entitled: L'influence des têtards sur les communautés de zooplancton, phytoplancton, et chimie de l'eau dans les mésocosmes expérimentaux;
- Dirley Cortes (Larsson Lab) for her Ph.D. research entitled : L’évolution des écosystèmes marins: un examen de la réaction de la biodiversité d’anciens écosystèmes marins à des changements climatiques et géographiques à grande échelle à travers le temps;
- and Hoai-Nam Bui for her Ph.D. research on : Le développement et l'évolution de la complexité de la colonne vertébrale.