The Irene Manton Prize

Prizes of £500 and a piece of fine art for the best doctoral thesis in botany (algae, fungi or plants), as judged by a paper published in the Linnean Society Journals.

Awarded for the best thesis in botany examined for a doctorate of philosophy, as judged by a paper published in one of the Linnean Society's journals. It is open to papers contributing to a PhD thesis, and published with the PhD student as first author.

Enter the prize by submitting a paper to a Linnean Society journal.

• The paper must be published in advanced access in one of the Linnean journals in the calendar year prior to the award year.
• There must be no more than two years between the date of submission to the journal (aka the date that the work is being submitted for assessment for the award) and the date that the thesis was awarded. Ongoing work that is being carried out by the PhD student but has not yet been submitted as a thesis is eligible, as it is considered not to have exceeded the two-year window.
• The paper must go through the peer review system and be accepted for publication (i.e. prize submissions that are not accepted for publication will be ejected).
• There must be confirmation from the PhD supervisor that the work has been carried out by the student.
• In the case of a multi-author paper, the PhD student must be the first author, and the supervisor must confirm the contribution the student has made.
• The nominated student cannot, at the time of nomination, be a member of the Linnean Society Council, or a family member.

Natalia Ruiz-Vargas

'I'm thrilled and honoured to receive recognition from this society for what I consider the privilege of studying the evolution of Caribbean plants. Thank you to everyone who made this possible, especially my advisor, Dr Mason-Gamer.'

Winning Paper: Natalia Ruiz-Vargas, Dimitris A. Herrera, Roberta Mason-Gamer. Island Hopping: Dispersal of Pitcairnia L’Her. (Bromeliaceae) through the Caribbean islands, Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, November 2025, boaf092, https://doi.org/10.1093/botlinnean/boaf092

Natalia Ruiz-Vargas and her contemporaries conducted field collections and gathered existing samples across the Pitcairnia genus (Bromeliaceae), with an emphasis on northern South America and Central America. They performed state of the art phylogenomic inference using high-throughput sequencing data for 63 individuals. Using this data they decipher evolutionary relationships in Pitcairnia, gene flow across the group, and phylogeographic patterns. Using biogeographical analyses, they discovered the origin of the Caribbean species, with a likely dispersal event from Venezuela to the islands around 200,000 years ago. 

From the Editor:‘Natalia Ruiz-Vargas’ paper represents an impressive piece of work, and rather unusually for a PhD student, Natalia has driven the study from conceptualisation through to data collection and analyses. The phylogenomic data analysis is not trivial and the analyses and overall paper are neatly presented, with the findings very clearly communicated.’ —Dr Steven Dodsworth, Editor-in-Chief, Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society