Last week, I was awarded the 2016 Hugo de Vries Prize (linked news item in Dutch only) for the best Dutch PhD thesis on a botanical subject. The prize, consisting of a certificate and a €5,000 sum, was awarded for my PhD thesis Plants, microbes and markets. Evolution and maintenance of belowground cooperation, which I defended in 2016.
During the annual meeting of the Graduate School of Experimental Plant Sciences, I delivered a prize lecture on my PhD research (link for lecture slides). It is a great honour to receive this award and be given the opportunity to share my research with the participants in this meeting.
The Hugo de Vries Prize is awarded annually by the Royal Dutch Botanical Society (KNBV) and the Hugo de Vries Foundation to highlight excellent Dutch research on botanical subjects. It is named after Hugo de Vries, a Dutch geneticist who was active in the late 19th and 20th century and is often considered the inventor of the concepts of the ‘gene’ and ‘mutation’.