2019 Deevey Award

The ESA Paleoecology section is pleased to announce the winner of the 2019 Deevey Award. The award goes to Nikunj Goel for his presentation at the 2019 ESA Annual Meeting (Louisville, KY) “On the origin and maintenance of savanna biome in Madagascar.” Nikunj received a Masters in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Yale University and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. His Master's research combined empirical data with new forms of spatial models, based upon reaction–diffusion approaches, to explore the role of dispersal in governing the expansion and maintenance of tropical savannas and forest ecotones. Nikunj's doctoral research explores the role of dispersal in shaping ecological and evolutionary patterns across scales. He works on a wide range of problems in dispersal biogeography, such as tropical biome boundary dynamics, human‐mediated invasions, accelerated range expansion, and source–sink dynamics. His ESA talk was coauthored by Erik Van Vleck, Julie C. Aleman, and A. Carla Staver. Photo credit: Fairuz Loutfi