Elis Jones Awarded Prestigious Callebaut Prize for Interdisciplinary Research

At the 2025 meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB), TUM researcher Elis Jones was jointly awarded the society’s ‘Callebaut Prize’. The prize is supported by the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, in honour of philosopher Werner Callebaut, and allocated by the ISHPSSB awards committee. It recognises, for early-career scholars, ‘the best manuscript utilizing an interdisciplinary approach based on a presentation at one of the two previous ISHPSSB meetings’. Elis’s paper, presented at the Toronto 2023 meeting, is titled ‘Exploring the socio-ecology of science: the case of coral reefs’, and is published as part of a special issue on the nature of research environments. It uses data from interviews with coral scientists, alongside ideas from ecology, philosophy, and STS, to argue that coral science is heavily shaped by, and in turn shapes, the ecological systems it is embedded within. The prize was shared with Richard Vangino, for his paper “Analogical Anatomy: Neurons, Networks and the Electric Telegraph”.