As announced earlier this year, GSA’s Board of Directors launched an audit to review the five major awards conferred by the Society: the Edward Novitski Prize, the Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education, the Genetics Society of America Medal, the George W. Beadle Award, and the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal.

The central goal of the audit was answering a key question: Do our current awards exemplify the GSA community’s core values? To answer this question, the audit assessed three essential components of the awards program: 1) the nomination process, 2) the review process, and 3) the eligibility and criteria used to confer each of the five awards. The Awards Audit Task Force discussed these components, looking for sources of bias, unintended barriers, and ways to diversify the nominees—and thus the award winners. The Task Force also met with focus groups to bring in a wider variety of opinions and points of view.

Based on the audit, the Task Force proposes the following changes to the GSA Awards process:

Nomination Process

Previously, two letters of support were required: an initial nomination letter, including a description of the nominee’s merit for the particular award and a letter of support from a secondary nominator. The letter of support could be co-signed by as many individuals as were willing. Nominees were then approached to provide an up-to-date CV. 

The audit identified a number of potential barriers and sources of bias within the existing nomination process. We have revamped the process in the following ways:

First, the Task Force recommends moving to a single nomination letter with a supporting questionnaire specific to the particular award. This questionnaire will help standardize the information collected on each nominee; nominees will help their nominators complete the questionnaire. The nominee will be contacted to provide an NIH-style biosketch (no more than five pages) and a brief lived experience statement. This statement allows nominees to volunteer information about their career paths, including potential barriers that they have faced and/or overcome, without requiring disclosure; it also lets nominees present their research/mentoring/teaching/DEI philosophies for consideration in addition to their biosketch. We invite self-nominations; self-nominators should reach out to a colleague to co-sign their nomination.

Second, GSA will create a GSA Awards Nomination Committee comprising members from the community representing the richness and diversity of the society. This subcommittee will proactively invite nominations from various departments, schools, model organism boards, and other relevant groups. The goal is to broaden the pool of nominees from a wide variety of backgrounds. 

Finally, as part of GSA’s efforts to improve equity and inclusion, we will collect nominee demographic data on a volunteer basis to help us gauge our progress. We strongly encourage nominees to answer demographic questions; their answers will not affect the committee’s decision-making process and will be kept confidential.

After five years, this new nomination process will be reviewed by the Board to assess the degree of success.

Review Process

The GSA Awards Committee oversees the review process. Members of the Awards Committee are appointed to a three-year term by the GSA President and Board of Directors. The committee reviews all nomination materials and identifies three candidates for each award. The three candidates from each award are submitted to the Board of Directors for consideration, and the Board votes to select the awardee.

The audit found that the review process did not need significant changes. 

Award Descriptions and Criteria

The audit revealed a measure of confusion about the potential overlap in criteria for some awards. Specifically, the Task Force noted that the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal and the Genetics Society of America Medal were often both used as lifetime achievement awards. The Beadle Award and Novitski Prize were both used to recognize contributions via community-resource/reagent creation. Additionally, the lack of recognition for early- and mid-career scientists was obvious. 

To best address these deficits, the criteria for each award will be refined as follows to best reflect GSA’s ethos and the goal of each award. Notably, the GSA Medal will now be explicitly defined as a mid-career award, and a new Early Career Medal will be added to the slate.

• The Morgan Medal will remain a lifetime recognition of an individual based on their contributions to the field of genetics, which include mentoring, community service and research portfolio.
• The GSA Medal will now be awarded at mid-career to an individual with seven to 15 years of experience in their independent research career at the time of nomination. The awardee will be recognized for their research excellence, mentoring, community engagement, and other related activities.
• A new GSA Early Career Medal will be awarded to an early-career individual within the first seven years of their independent research career at the time of nomination. The awardee will be recognized for their research excellence, mentoring, community engagement, and other related activities.
• The Novitski Prize will recognize creativity at all career stages, including graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty. The nomination must clearly state the creative effort being recognized, and up to two individuals may jointly receive the prize.
• The Jones Award will continue to recognize the contribution to education from K-12 onwards. Individuals and teams can be nominated.
• The Beadle Award recognizes an individual’s service to the community. Beadle nominees should have clear and demonstrable community engagement, service, and leadership beyond research endeavors. GSA will particularly invite nominations of individuals who have worked to make the community more inclusive and diverse. Individuals and teams can be nominated.

Timeline

To give us time to enact these changes and ensure process updates, the Task Force recommended extending the awards cycle timeline. The Board of Directors discussed this recommendation and agreed that GSA will not announce any awards for 2022. Instead, applications will be solicited early in 2023 to be awarded in summer of the same year.

Harmit Malik loves conflict—genetic conflict, that is. “I’m really interested in this idea that components of the same genome, or components of different genomes, are constantly doing battle with each other,” says Malik, who heads a lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

To understand genetic conflict, Malik focuses on the parts of the genome that are rapidly changing and evolving. By studying these tumultuous regions, Malik has made impactful discoveries, some of which have overturned the conventional wisdom in genetics that the most important elements of the genome are protected from rapid mutation.

For his contributions, Harmit Malik has been awarded the 2022 Edward Novitski Prize, which recognizes an extraordinary level of creativity and intellectual ingenuity in the solution of significant problems in genetics research.

Breaking evolution’s “speed limit”

Some genes evolve quickly, while others haven’t changed much throughout evolutionary history. Immune system genes, for instance, evolve fast to keep up with the relentless onslaught of different pathogens that they need to fight. For these genes, agility provides the organism with a selective advantage.

On the other hand, genes and proteins that are needed for fundamental cellular functions, like mitosis and meiosis, are expected to evolve much more slowly. Mutations in these genes would be detrimental to the organism’s fitness, presumably, and therefore kept to a minimum. It turns out that this isn’t always the case, however. During his postdoc, Malik made the astonishing discovery that centromeres, among the most essential structures in the cell, undergo unexpectedly rapid evolution.

Centromeres are the constricted regions that give chromosomes their “belted” appearance. They ensure that during cell division, both daughter cells inherit a full and correct set of chromosomes. Centromeric DNA is highly repetitive and does not encode genes, and centromeric histones are proteins that bind to these DNA repeats.

“Centromeric DNA, base pair for base pair, is actually one of the fastest evolving components of our genome,” he says, and centromeric proteins also showed a similarly rapid mutation rate. In fact, the researchers found that mutations arise in these regions faster than the random mutation rate would predict, implying an evolutionary pressure driving the rapid change. At the time, this was “a completely heretical idea, and one of the very first instances where an essential gene had been evolving under what we refer to as positive selection—this idea of faster than expected evolution,” Malik says.

Intrigued, he set out to find what was driving the rapid evolution of centromeric DNA and proteins. During the process of egg formation, four haploid daughter cells are formed, but only one gets selected to be the egg and the other three are destroyed. “We realized this actually introduced an incredible degree of competition as to which chromosomal variant was going to be inherited as the egg chromosome,” says Malik. This competition set the stage for “selfish” genetic variants to arise. A mutation in the centromeric DNA or proteins that increased the chance of being passed down to the egg would have a selective advantage.

Still, something didn’t add up. “It was actually against the best interests of the genome to have this selfish behavior,” says Malik. If centromeric DNA and proteins evolved together, each boosting the other’s inheritance rate, the selfish elements would quickly take over the population and reduce the genetic diversity of the offspring. “We then realized that, actually, they were probably working in conflict with each other,” Malik says. Malik and his postdoc mentor, Steve Henikoff, proposed the “centromere drive model,” which explains the rapid co-evolution of centromeric proteins and DNA as an effect of genetic conflict. While selfish centromeric DNA evolves to increase its chance of being passed down, the centromeric proteins were evolving to suppress this inequity and increase the random chance of any chromosome surviving to the next generation. “The entire centromere drive hypothesis came about to reconcile how something so fundamental to our cell division process could be subjected to the kind of innovation that we see in the host-pathogen interaction,” Malik explains.

Beyond the centromere

While Malik’s work has uncovered a tremendous amount about the evolution of the centromere, his interest in genetic conflicts has taken him into other uncharted research waters. “I think what most of us do is pick a topic that we’re interested in and then try to figure out how to address it,” says Sue Biggins, director of the Basic Sciences Division at Fred Hutchinson. “He has this opposite way of doing it, which is to say if something’s rapidly evolving, something super interesting is happening. He has this fascinating way of using rapid evolution to open up the questions for him. To me, that is the hallmark of someone really creative.”

For instance, Malik helped pioneer the field of paleovirology, studying the traces of viral genes left behind in host genomes over the course of evolution. Viruses are constantly mutating and evolving, and, correspondingly, defenses arise in the genomes of host organisms to combat them. By studying the DNA evidence of this evolutionary arms race, Malik and others hope to glean information about viral defense strategies that could someday be translated into antiviral therapies.

Malik’s creative enthusiasm makes him invaluable as a mentor and colleague. “Talking science with Harmit is invigorating and joyful, in part because of his openness, his authenticity, and his humility,” says Mia Levine of the University of Pennsylvania, who nominated Malik for the award. “He is a perpetual student, making these conversations feel like one of collaborative discovery. These interactions help you see the gold that you are sitting on and give you the confidence to tell the world about it.”

Creative ideas that challenge existing paradigms often run into resistance from the community, and it can take courage to swim against the current. Malik says that he draws on the fearlessness he learned from his mentors to convey that sense of daring to his early career scientists while also providing honest feedback. “My mentor was super supportive, and he really wanted us to not be afraid of being wrong,” he says. “I’m trying very hard to do the same thing. I want people to recognize that science is not a zero-sum game, that it’s actually possible for you to be successful and yet be a really good colleague.”

The Edward Novitski Prize recognizes an extraordinary level of creativity and intellectual ingenuity in the solution of significant problems in genetics research. The prize honors solid, significant, scientific experimental work—either a single experimental accomplishment or a body of work.