ISME award renamed to honour Alma Dal Co
ISME and the Alma Dal Co Foundation are delighted to announce the renaming of the ISME Early Career Award to the ISME Alma Dal Co Award to commemorate the life and work of Alma Dal Co (1989 - 2022).
Alma Dal Co was a true renaissance woman, whose own words best described her extensive interests: "I was doing physics when biology ran over me. I got fascinated by how complex functionality arises in ... bacterial communities... . If I am not in the office, I am at the piano. If I am not at the piano, I am under water spearfishing."1
Despite her young age, Alma Dal Co made important and valuable discoveries at the frontier between physics and microbiology by revealing how metabolic interactions at very small spatial scales structure microbial communities. She was one of the youngest researchers to become a professor at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), Switzerland, at 32, and her talk at ISME18 in Lausanne in 2022 was one of the highlights of the meeting.
The ISME Alma Dal Co Award aims to honour Alma Dal Co's significant contributions to the field of microbial ecology, preserve her intellectual heritage, and inspire early career researchers to pursue groundbreaking research in the spirit of Alma Dal Co's passion for knowledge, innovation and multidisciplinary.
The ISME Alma Dal Co Award recognizes early career researchers who have made significant contributions to microbial ecology. All researchers working in the field of microbial ecology who gained their PhD ten or less years ago are eligible for this award. Any ISME Member can nominate a candidate, with calls opening in the fall of uneven years. Previous awardees include Ian Head (2004), Phil Hugenholtz (2006), Forest Rohwer (2008), Marc Strous (2010), Victoria Orphan (2012), Ruth Ley (2014), Gene Tyson (2016), Catherine Lozupone (2018) and Kelly Wrighton (2022).
To learn more about:
Alma Dal Co and the Foundation named in her honour
Alma Dal Co’s publications
The International Society for Microbial Ecology
1 https://scholar.harvard.edu/almadalco/about-me