Lynette Loke and Ryan Chisholm awarded the 2025 George Mercer Award

The Ecological Society of America (ESA) has awarded Lynette and Ryan the George Mercer Award for their paper testing theories of community assembly using an experiment on intertidal communities in Singapore (Loke & Chisholm 2023).

The George Mercer Award was established in 1948 and is awarded annually for an outstanding ecological research paper published within the last two years by a younger researcher (under 40 years of age).

The ESA announcement wrote, “Deftly integrating field experiments with clear hypotheses and mathematical modeling, this study provides novel insights into an ecological question that has been debated for decades. The results of the paper advance our understanding of the forces structuring ecological communities, and the authors combine theory and empirical evidence in a creative and exceptionally well-written way.”

Associate Professor Ryan Chisholm is a leading theoretical ecologist at the National University of Singapore and a long-standing collaborator of the lab.