By Petra Dreiser

Two members of EEB’s Graduate Department, Luke Mahler and Rob Ness, have received prestigious Connaught Mid-Career Researcher Awards for 2025-2026. The annual awards support mid-career researchers who are leading significant and innovative research, with the goal of boosting their competitiveness for large-scale external research funding. 

“We are delighted to see Luke Mahler and Rob Ness recognized with Mid-Career Connaught Awards,” says Joel Levine, chair of the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. “These awards celebrate the originality and impact of their research and offer a wonderful reflection of the strength and breadth of scholarship in EEB.”   

Let ‘s take a closer look at Mahler and Ness’s award-winning research projects: 

Luke Mahler, “Evolutionary Opportunity and the Richness of Ecological Communities” 

A key aim of ecology is to be able to predict the diversity of local communities from first principles, the basic, fundamental laws of nature. Yet for a while now, ecologists have understood that the evolutionary diversity of the surrounding region can trickle down to shape local community diversity, often overruling simple ecological predictions from first principles. These historical factors have typically been treated as a black box, or simply as “historical contingencies” that make it hard to predict the composition of ecological communities. With his work, Mahler aims to open this black box and obtain a deeper understanding of the circumstances in which evolutionary history matters for community composition. “Ultimately,” he says, “my group’s hope is that we can better understand when and how evolutionary history shapes the diversity of local ecological communities.” 

Mahler and his team will test his ideas using Anolis lizards, a powerful “natural experiment” in which similar ecological specialists have evolved repeatedly in different regions. “This repeated evolutionary history allows unusually strong tests of how evolutionary processes shape present-day community diversity,” Mahler explains.  

The core of his project first emerged in the field, when Mahler observed lizard communities in various places in the New World tropics, noticing that they revealed intriguing patterns of diversity he initially found difficult to explain. To make sense of those patterns, Mahler developed what he calls the “evolutionary opportunity hypothesis,” and rigorously testing it will constitute the focal point of his Connaught research. 

“The Connaught is a gamer-changer for my research program,” he admits. “This work is complex and integrative, requiring extensive tropical fieldwork, data collection from natural history museums, and the development of new statistical models. The Connaught will provide me the resources to assemble the right team for this job, and to carry out this work on an accelerated timeline.”  

Key early ideas related to the project were published in an article in Ecology Letters in 2022, co-authored by Mahler, Luke Owen Frishkoff (Texas), and Gavia Lertzman-Lepofsky, who recently earned her PhD from EEB. Now Mahler and his team seek to advance their explanations of why similar environments often support different numbers and types of species. Mahler believes they are based on regions’ varying long-term opportunities for species to evolve.  

Beyond its scientific impact, the project holds relevance to conservation: Habitat loss remains the greatest threat to biodiversity, and Mahler’s work will strengthen the scientific basis of tools that can help predict how entire communities, rather than individual species, will respond to environmental change. 

Rob Ness, “Does Perfect DNA Repair Come at a Cost?” 

The Ness lab studies how evolution shapes the genome, with a special interest in how new variation created by mutation and recombination alters the course of natural selection to drive evolution. For his Connaught project, Ness is investigating the impact of new mutations in DNA. “Even though these mutations are generally harmful,” Ness explains, “we still have many new mutations each generation and in each of the cells in our body.” Why is there no attempt to simply eliminate these mostly deleterious mutations? 

One idea to explain the persistence of new mutations, says Ness, is that “it simply takes too much time and energy to eliminate all mutations” by reducing DNA damage and cellular repair mechanisms. In other words, lowering the number of mutations might come at a (high) biological cost, a cost no one so far has properly measured. That is what Ness’s research aims to do.  

“The Connaught,” he says, “allows me to pursue this challenge by providing funding to hire people that bring new technical expertise to my research group. The Connaught provides the stimulus to make this relatively high-risk research feasible.”  

Ness has dedicated more than 15 years to studying the evolution of mutation rate, one of the major remaining mysteries in evolutionary biology: “The mutation rate varies more than 1,000-fold across life,” he says. In some organisms, like viruses, DNA can mutate very quickly, while in others, like most microbes, DNA is more stable, with a drastic difference in rate between them. “General dissatisfaction” with scientists’ continued lack of understanding these massive disparities inspired Ness toward his latest project.