This committee is charged with soliciting, judging, and awarding the Marjorie Grene Prize and the Werner Callebaut Prize at the ISHPSSB meeting.
The unexpected departure of the sitting President of the ISHPSSB in 2014 led to the institution of a memorial prize, to honour the memory of his tireless and inspired work with students. For this reason the inaugural Callebaut Prize award was chosen by the pre-existing 2015 committee for the Society's other student prize, the Marjorie Grene Prize; this situation was maintained in the subsequent cycles.
Marjorie Grene and Werner Callebaut Prizes Committee Report, 2015
A joint committee was convened to consider submissions for both of the graduate student paper prizes (the long-standing Grene prize and the new Callebaut prize), given that a number of submissions were entered in both prize competitions. Members included Rachel Ankeny (chair), Marion Blute, Jay Odenbaugh, and Neeraja Sankaran. The Marjorie Grene Prize is awarded every two years for the best manuscript based on a presentation at one of the two previous ISHPSSB meetings by someone who was, at the time of presentation, a graduate student. For the 2015 Prize, the Prize Committee received a total of 20 submissions. All were of superb quality, with more than half already published or accepted for publication generally in very high quality journals. Deciding on just one recipient proved to be a very difficult task, particularly given the different disciplinary approaches represented in the submissions. The 2015 Marjorie Grene Prize was awarded to Jun Otsuka for his paper “Using Causal Models to Integrate Proximate and Ultimate Causation,” which was presented at the 2013 ISHPSSB meeting in Montpellier. The paper was published this year in Biology and Philosophy. Jun is currently an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at Kobe University, and previously was a postdoctoral fellow in Philosophy at the University of California at Davis. He completed his PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University in 2014. The Callebaut Prize will be awarded every two years, and is intended to advance the careers of recent graduates working at the intersection of the fields represented by ISHPSSB. It will be awarded to the best manuscript utilizing an interdisciplinary approach based on a presentation at one of the two previous ISHPSSB meetings by someone who was, at the time of presentation, a graduate student. We are grateful to individual donors who have supported this prize, as well as to the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) whose Board has agreed to support this prize biennially for the first three prizes (with the possibility of renewal). For the 2015 Prize, the Prize Committee received a total of 12 submissions. All were of very high quality, with more than half already published or accepted for publication. This year’s Werner Callebaut Prize is awarded to Sara Green for her paper "Systems Biology and the Quest for Organizing Principles,” which was presented at the 2013 ISHPSSB meeting in Montpellier. A revised version of the paper, co-authored with the systems biologist Olaf Wolkenhauer, was published in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences in 2013. Green completed her PhD in 2014 at Aarhus University, Denmark, and currently is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Science Education at the University of Copenhagen. This year’s committee was excellent and functioned extremely well, particularly with the new situation of needing to award two prizes. However based on this year’s experiences, it is recommended that future prize committees involve more members (given the overall relatively large number of high-quality submissions) and also that all members have interdisciplinary backgrounds in order to more efficiently and effectively be able to do comparisons across papers using different approaches and methods.