Heru Handika was born and raised in West Sumatra, Indonesia, and is now a Ph.D. candidate at Louisiana State University. Since his youth, Heru has been mainly interested in mountains, computers, and mammals. These seemingly independent interests eventually collided to form the basis of his current research. Heru’s research centers on the diversity and evolutionary history of small mammals in the islands of Southeast Asia. To improve the accessibility and efficiency of such research, he developed software that enables data acquisition and analysis on affordable computers and mobile devices. His software projects include the NAHPU field catalog for biodiversity inventory (in development), the ULLAR cross-platform phylogenomic pipeline (in development), and the SEGUL phylogenomic tool (Handika & Esselstyn, 2024). He has also devoted significant time to conducting essential mammalian inventories, including over 30 expeditions in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, where he frequently trains local students. These field inventories have contributed significantly to our understanding of mammalian diversity and endemism in Southeast Asia.

In 2020, Heru received the SSB Graduate Research Student Award for his work elucidating the role of mountains in shaping native small mammal diversity on Sulawesi Island, Indonesia. In 2024, Heru was the SSB Ernst Mayr Award co-winner. In his Ernst Mayr Symposium talk, Heru emphasized the need for cross-platform, user-friendly genomic software to improve the inclusivity and accessibility of genomic studies. He showcased SEGUL as a practical solution for current phylogenomic workflows and a proof of concept for accessible genomic software. Next year, Heru will start his postdoc in the Porto lab at the University of Florida. He will work on developing a cross-platform, GPU-agnostic machine-learning approach to studying biodiversity. Heru is passionate about making biodiversity research more accessible and is eager to further his contributions to this field.

Jerrica Jamison is in the 5th year of her PhD program at the University of Toronto. Jerrica had an appreciation for nature at a young age and developed a fascination with evolutionary processes through visiting natural history museums. Her undergraduate research focused on examining changes in gene evolution across marine mammals, solidifying her interest in convergent phenotypes. In her PhD, Jerrica is studying the metabolic underpinnings of sugar metabolism in nectivorous and frugivorous bats. She has been able to identify conserved patterns of metabolic evolution across the multiple origins of these dietary guilds and has used these patterns to create putative sub-niches within nectivory. She is now evaluating whether trends in skull morphology and gene evolution correlate with the metabolic niches she’s uncovered.

Jerrica is a winner of the 2024 Ernst Mayr Award and will be spending the next year wrapping up lab work and writing her dissertation. She’s spent the past several years trekking across the jungles of four continents while collecting samples and is excited to finally be able to share her results.