Yuko Ulrich is first winner of the Zukunftskolleg Research Award
Yuko Ulrich is a biologist from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena. She convinced the jury with her research on the interaction between social organization and disease resistance in social insects.
In her research group, Yuko Ulrich addresses questions such as:
1. How does the composition of a social group affect its structure and the rates and pathways of disease transmission within that group?
2. How does infection or immune status affect individual and collective behavior within and across generations?
3. How do larvae control adult behavior and reproduction? And how does this affect their own development and the survival of the adult insects?
Yuko Ulrich received her PhD from ETH Zurich, where she studied the evolutionary ecology of bumblebees under the supervision of Paul Schmid-Hempel. As a postdoc in Daniel Kronauer's group at Rockefeller University, New York, she helped establish the raider ant as a model for studying social behavior. She founded an independent research group at the University of Lausanne, which moved to ETH Zurich and finally to the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena.
The newly introduced Zukunftskolleg Research Award recognizes scientific achievements of young researchers and supports them in further developing their personal profile. In 2022, the prize is awarded for outstanding research on the topic of "Evolution of Behavior".
Read more here.
More information on the Research Award.