Paul Cziko wins NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
Paul Cziko, a first-year doctoral student in CEEB, has been awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This highly competitive award -- the NSF offered only about one thousand this year in all fields of science and engineering, and just 22 to evolutionary biologists --
provides three years of support for outstanding graduate students whom the NSF expects to contribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovation in science and engineering.
Paul proposed to focus his graduate work at CEEB on invertebrate antifreeze molecules -- special proteins that allow adaptation to life in extremely cold water -- as a model for adaptive and convergent evolution. Fittingly, he thought of this while diving underneath an ice sheet in Antarctica before coming to UO. On the expedition, Paul used his limited free time to collect samples and generate the preliminary data and hypotheses for his successful proposal.
Above, Paul prepares for a dive (and some underwater brainstorming) in Antarctica.