Graduate Student Akshat Mall Receives R.C. Lewontin Early Award

from Society for the Study of Evolution

September 28, 2023

Akshat Mall, a third year grad student in the Christopher Marx lab at the University of Idaho, was selected as one of the R.C. Lewontin Early Award winners by the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE). Mall will be presenting his thesis work on Monday, October 2, 2023 at 9 am PDT and can be seen on Zoom with a link on the SSE home page.

"His work is on what I think is one of the most exciting areas we have ever come across in the lab: what appears to be Lamarckian evolution," says Chris Marx. Great work by a former postdoc, Jessica Lee (now running her own lab at NASA Ames), and a former PhD student, Siavash Riazi (now a postdoc at Simon Fraser), got us rolling into phenotypic heterogeneity with a paper that was in PLOS Genetics. Akshat has taken this further to show just how remarkable the epigenetic inheritance is and the first (to our knowledge) demonstration of what Marx thinks can fairly be described by the apparent oxymoron stated above: Lamarckian evolution. Differential, long-term success of lineages due to inherited non-genetic differences…

By Michelle Reagan,
IIDS Scientific Communications and Design Specialist