Developmental Biology Outstanding Paper Award Winners

By Valentina Sasselli, Associate Publisher, Cell Biology, DB-Elsevier

This year, Developmental Biology, the official journal of the Society for Developmental Biology (SDB) inaugurated the “DB Outstanding Paper Award”, a prize designed to promote the work of early career researchers that have published in Developmental Biology.

The inaugural prize winner is Ann M. Cavanaugh (Stowers Institute) for the manuscript “Two developmentally distinct populations of neural crest cells contribute to the zebrafish heart (Vol 404 Issue 2, 2015).” Along with the winner, the editorial team also identified two runner-ups, Jennifer Lovick (University of California, Los Angeles) for “Lineage-associated tracts defining the anatomy of the Drosophila first instar larval brain (Vol 406 issue 1)” and Hao Chang (Johns Hopkins University) for “The spatio-temporal domains of Frizzled6 action in planar polarity control of hair follicle orientation (Vol 409 Issue 1, 2015).”

The winner and runner-ups were selected from over 296 manuscripts published by Developmental Biology in 2015 based on quality and impact of the published work, coverage of one of the main themes of the journal and number of downloads in the first three months from publication.

The first-place prize is an invited talk at the upcoming SDB annual meeting to be held in Boston, August 4-8, 2016. The runner-ups will receive free registration to the same meeting and a formal invitation to submit an abstract for consideration in a short presentation in one of the available sessions. Elsevier will provide travel assistance and SDB will waive the meeting registration fee for all three winners.

Ann Cavanaugh’s award winning work was completed while a graduate student in Jau-Nian Chen’s lab at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently a postdoc in Sue Jaspersen’s lab at Stowers. Jennifer Lovick completed her winning paper as a graduate student in Volker Hartenstein’s lab at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently doing a postdoc with Dr. Hartenstein. Finally, Hao Chang is a postdoc in Jeremy Nathan’s lab at Johns Hopkins University where work on his winning paper was completed.