School of Biological Sciences graduate Keith Bowers, M.S. ’11, Ph.D. ’14, has won the international John Maynard Smith Prize from the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB).

Currently, Bowers is a National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded postdoctoral fellow with professors Charles Thompson and Scott Sakaluk assessing the consequences of maternal stress in the house wren (a native song bird). The John Maynard Smith Prize includes a monetary award; an all-expenses-paid trip to deliver a lecture at the 2017 ESEB Congress in Groningen, The Netherlands; and a three-month fellowship to study at a research institute in Berlin.

Bowers also received Illinois State’s 2016 Clarence W. Sorensen Distinguished Dissertation Award. This fall Bowers will be starting a tenure-track assistant professor position in evolutionary and physiological ecology in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Memphis.