Bridges and Sturtevant Prize

Description: 

This prize results from an anonymous donation in 2011 establishing an endowment for the prize. Bridges and Sturtevant were certainly amazing Columbia undergrads who were true pioneers of modern genetics. Alfred Sturtevant is recounted to have taken time off from studying for classes one weekend to work on understanding some crosses. The result was his figuring out that genes were arranged in a row on a chromosome.

The prize description reads: "Columbia shall .... award an annual prize to be known as the Bridges and Sturtevant Prize in Biological Sciences in honor of Calvin Bridgesand Alfred Sturtevant. Their pioneering studies as Columbia College undergraduates - using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster in Thomas Hunt Morgan's laboratory - laid the basis for our understanding of genes and the way they behave. Each year the prize will be awarded to one or more graduating seniors whose experimental or computational research is deemed to have been both highly original and fruitful by a committee of faculty to be selected by the Chair of Biological Sciences."

General Information:

Faculty members in the Dept. of Biological Sciences can nominate student(s) for the prize. A committee of faculty members decide who will receive the award.

It is awarded yearly, just before graduation. 

Awarded to a graduating senior whose research has been deemed highly original and fruitful. 

Each student is awarded $1000. 

Past recipients:

2025 - Aryan Ghotra, Peter Gorman, Kevin Rostam

2024 - Avi Adler, Ashley Liang, Simon Ogundare

2023 - Arooba Ahmed, Andrew Chang, Aida Razavilar

2022 - Tamta Arakhamia, Arya Rao and Ashley Gutierrez

2021 - Christina Lee, Jacob Dahan, Jason Mohabir

2020 - Joshua Choe, Thomas Li, Sohil Patel

2019 - Waleed Ali, Ananya Jain, Sakila Nazia

2018 - Luis Valencia Salazar, Felix Rozenberg, Alexandra Tavachnikova

2017 - Alexandra Schurer, Christina Firl, Julia Davis-Porada

2016 - Clara Altomare, Samuel Kim, Felix Jin