Joshua Plotkin Awarded 2015 Akira Okubo Prize

Professor of Biology Joshua Plotkin has been named winner of the 2015 Akira Okubo Prize, awarded by the International Society for Mathematical Biology and the Japanese Society for Mathematical Biology. The prize honors scientists “for outstanding and innovative theoretical work, for establishing superb conceptual ideas, for solving tough theoretical problems, and/or for uniting theory and data to advance biological science." 

Plotkin holds joint appointments in the Department of Biology in Penn Arts and Sciences and in the Department of Computer and Information Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. In granting his award, the societies cited Plotkin’s work on tropical trees and species-area curves, the evolution of language and language acquisition, and the role of apoptosis and DNA repair in tumorigenesis. More recently, Plotkin’s focus has been on theoretical modeling in evolutionary biology. This includes extensive work on the influenza virus, where he has analyzed unique data sets in ways that have exposed novel structure in the diversity of strains, which could potentially lead to significant implications for public health. Plotkin is also involved in research on adaptation in populations. His work has provided a theoretical basis for the role of neutral mutations and for inferring properties of an organism’s fitness landscape from temporal data.

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